The biggest areas Pacers will miss Tyrese Haliburton

It will be very unlikely for the Indiana Pacers to recapture the magic of last year as they are (most likely) going to be without their best player, Tyrese Haliburton, for the entirety of the 2025-26 campaign. While they have been putting up an incredible fight in their season-opener against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Haliburton is going to be such a major loss for the league’s biggest darling.

Haliburton is the engine that drives this Pacers offense, and it’s not quite clear how Indiana will be competing with another man powering this machine. Bennedict Mathurin and Pascal Siakam are poised for big years, and so might be Andrew Nembhard despite his rough opening night, but the floor general’s contributions aren’t going to be replaced or filled that easily.

On ESPN’s Thursday night broadcast of the Pacers’ season-opener against the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder, they showed a graphic that provides some insight as to how valuable Haliburton was last year for the team. Indiana went 33-4 (89.1 percent win rate) whenever he scored 20 points or more, they went 20-3 (86.9%) when he recorded 12 or more assists, and 61-35 when he was on the active roster (playoffs and regular season combined).

Having an elite point guard at the controls was what made the Pacers so dangerous last season. Haliburton’s number one goal as a basketball player is to make everyone around him better, and he does that with the way he plays so unselfishly. But Indiana’s play reaches a whole new level whenever he becomes more aggressive in hunting for his shot, and his scoring threat makes his playmaking all the more dangerous.

The Pacers will also be missing Haliburton’s tendency to come up huge with daggers in the clutch, as Indiana would not have made it to Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals in the first place if it weren’t for some of the bonkers shots that he hit.

Tyrese Haliburton might be out, but the Pacers’ fighting spirit lives