We knew Tyrese Haliburton would be good, but how good? The data behind his rise (2024)

At the quarter mark of the season, Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton is the star experiencing the biggest breakout. With the keys to the Pacers’ offense firmly in his possession, Haliburton has been the driving force for what is on track to be among the best NBA offenses ever, if not the absolute best.

A first-time All-Star a season ago, Haliburton has improved, in some cases substantially, in every single statistical category save for, ironically, steals. But we’ll get to why that amuses me in a bit.

Despite the biggest knock on him coming into the league was a supposed inability to be a high-volume scorer, Haliburton’s 26.1 points per game place him 12th in the league, while his 12.0 assists per game puts him atop the association. He has done this while both reducing his turnovers and increasing his scoring efficiency.

Basketball Reference tracks a stat called “TS+” which is simply how many points more or less a player has scored compared to league average efficiency on the same number of scoring attempts. Last year, Haliburton’s +79.5 finished a very respectable 41st, a ranking more impressive than it might appear given the prevalence of lower usage dive-and-dunk bigs on that particular leaderboard. Through his first 19 games of 2023-24, he has already added 69.2 points via this metric, third in the NBA.

If the Pacers and Haliburton are one of the happiest surprises of the season, the seeming demise of the Golden State Warriors, currently 11th in the West, is one of the larger disappointments. While the current focus is rightfully on Draymond Green again drawing a lengthy suspension for an act of on-court violence, the Warriors’ thin roster and over-reliance on Steph Curry have been constant points of discussion.

For obvious reasons, the selection of James Wiseman with the second overall pick in the 2020 draft is Prosecution Exhibit 1A in the case against the Warriors’ talent management. “What if they had just drafted Hali?” goes the common lament. Wiseman was and is clearly a bust. Even if he manages to revive his career in Detroit or elsewhere, the chances of him performing at or near the level expected of his draft position are negligible.

But the recriminations over not selecting Haliburton instead are a bit unfair. Even in hindsight, it’s difficult to imagine a team selecting him that early.

There are many ways to analyze draft prospects, whether from pure “eye-test” scouting to statistical modeling or even better a healthy mixture of both. One of the key parts of such an exercise is contextualizing the members of a draft class against each other. A common practice is assigning each player a projected future level or an estimate of the probabilities the player lands in a given category.

The scales used by NBA teams tend to be somewhat similar, with projections flowing from worst to best with classifications something like:

• Not an NBA player
• 2-Way/Exhibit 10
• Developmental Roster (a similar non-rotation role to the “Veteran Roster” appellation given to older players of like stature)
• Low Rotation
• High Rotation
• Starter/Key Reserve
• Core
• Franchise

In my annual Tiers project, I’ve adopted this taxonomy to a degree. Tier 1 and perhaps the top of Tier 2 as Franchise players, the remainder of Tiers 2 through 4 as core pieces, Tier 5 as starters or key reserves and the remaining three-quarters of the league falling into the other categories.

I’ve always tried to avoid projecting players into the “franchise” bucket. “Core+” was my perhaps cowardly way of ducking that question. The reason for this is that there are so few true franchise players— there were only six players in my Tier 1 last offseason — and each one is so unique that it’s hard to find a common thread to explain how a player breaks into that stratosphere. Is there any sort of shared trait between Curry, Giannis Anteotokunmpo and Nikola Jokič, other than they’re all really damn good?

So you’re looking for a player with something unique. And as a prospect, Haliburton had that.

First of all, I’m going to declare him as a win for statistical draft modeling. I know that my model, and I suspect most others around the league at the time, picked up on him pretty early in his freshman year at Iowa State as a player with high-level playmaking skills, wonderful defensive peripherals — he was a member of the “2-2” club, perimeter players with collegiate block and steal rates each above two percent – and efficient offense.

As an aside, while Haliburton is a win for the predictive power of steals in college, he is also a demonstration of college steal rate being more an indication of overall goodness than pure defensive potential. A look at players with elevated collegiate steals rates uncovers some excellent defenders – Marcus Smart and Haliburton’s Pacers teammate T.J. McConnell, to name two. But the group also includes those who became high-level scorers and questionable defenders like the Pelicans’ CJ McCollum. Best we can tell, frequent steals illustrate some combination of athleticism and game-reading ability that allows player to make plays on the ball.

So Haliburton clearly had some ability, just in an oddly shaped package. In particular the fact that the efficiency of his scoring came on minuscule volume made him hard to evaluate in terms of potential NBA role.

Some of his judiciousness could be explained by him being an 18-year old freshman on a team with three other players who appeared in NBA games (Talen Horton-Tucker, Lindell Wigginton and Marial Shayok), a future EuroLeague starter (Nick Weiler-Babb for Germany’s Bayern Munich) and an NFL tight end (Michael Jacobsen, currently with the New Orleans Saints). But, still, exactly one player in the NBA this year — Mitchell Robinson at 9.4 — has a lower usage rate than Haliburton’s 9.6 as a freshman. We’ve basically never seen someone with that sort of profile in college against inferior competition turn into a big time scorer in the NBA.

As a sophomore, Haliburton’s usage rose to an average-ish 20.4, but in a way, this was more damning. All the previous year’s talent save the future tight end — Jacobson’s career arc is wild — had departed, yet as the clear and substantially best player on an only moderately talented team, Haliburton could only manage an average-ish scoring role.

Excellent role players are valuable, but if you are selecting early in the draft, you are looking for “Core+,” not a 3-and-D or connector type.

It’s not as if Haliburton’s ability was unknown. Over the 14 seasons for which Sports Reference has the statistic available, 122 Division I players have had at least one season with a “Box Plus-Minus” (BPM) — an attempt to estimate a player’s per possession impact via analysis of their box score numbers — of 11 or higher. Sepending on how generous you want to be, between 45 and 60 of those players went on to become solid or better NBA mainstays. The group also includes its share of future all-stars: Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Davis, Donovan Mitchell, Victor Oladipo and Trae Young, to name a few. It’s a good group to be in.

But those that became stars were also star scorers in college, while the best recent outcome for such a productive player with usage as low as Haliburton is Mikal Bridges. Again, very good, but not the star being sought.

Which is why I didn’t like projecting franchise players in the first place. A defensively frail ball-handler with a funky looking jumper can’t be a franchise player. Until he is. It’s a bit too early to say Haliburton is all the way there — if “there” is where the top five-ish players in the world live.

Even as early as last season, there were signs of this potential. Like most superstars, Haliburton does things unconventionally, from his shoulder-mounted jumper to his discovery that jump passes are good now. An unusual style does not always a star make, as there are a lot more Kyle Andersons weirding their way to solid effectiveness at best. But when that unconventionality turns into league-leading playmaking combined with efficient 20-point-per game scoring, as Haliburton managed a year ago, the result is much more than merely “solid.”

It was more than enough to warrant him his first All-Star nod last season, but then he got better again, and in the least expected way: By pumping his usage rate up to the high 20s with the odd jump shot mechanics, which had raised questions about his ability to create his own shot turning into another strength. Haliburton’s 7.0 pull-up three attempts per game is second to only Luka Dončić, but Haliburton has made 42.4 percent of them.

Another unusual aspect about Haliburton and the Pacers in general has been their ball-movement. It is common for heliocentric teams to have low overall assist rates, with the central star doing a lot of playmaking but everyone else largely being a finisher. The Pacers sit 13th in percentage of assisted field goals this season at 63 percent. Compare that to other teams led by ball-dominant stars:

• Dallas with Dončić: 60.1 percent (21st)
• New York with Jalen Brunson: 58.5 percent (25th)
• Oklahoma City with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander: 58.0 percent (26th)
• Atlanta with Trae Young: 57.8 percent (28th)

The free-flowing style and pace at which Indy plays make comparisons with Steve Nash’s “Seven Seconds or Less” Suns inevitable, but with a touch more offensive aggression from the engine. Nash’s highest usage rate on those Phoenix teams was 23.3, closer to the 23.8 Haliburton achieved last year than the 26.4 usage Haliburton’s carrying so far this season.

All that said, as great as he’s been this season – and the too-early-to-discuss-but-here-it-is-anyway MVP buzz is fully warranted – we shouldn’t fully consider him for “franchise” or “Tier 1” status until he performs at a similar level in the postseason. Certainly, a run to the finals of the inaugural In-Season Tournament was a great first step, but some impressive wins in a single-elimination format is a far cry from having to beat the same team four times after they’ve had substantial time to prepare for him.

In the context of this Pacers team, “doing it in the playoffs” means something between making the second round or a competitive first-round loss to one of the established East powers.

But that’s a question that can’t be answered until April and May. Until then, it’s best to simply enjoy his emergence as perhaps the league’s next one-of-one star.

(Photo of Tyrese Haliburton: Jeff Haynes / NBAE via Getty Images)