How Tyrese Haliburton shined in turning off the lights (Patreon)

Illuminating the details that culminated in the star's big, late-game performance  

By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper 

There was an air of angst to the first half of what was the first-ever In-Season Tournament quarterfinal. For a player who typically cascades with flow, wheeling around the floor in tandem speed with the rapidly rotating wheels that are always turning in his head, Tyrese Haliburton was a bit choppy, pressing at times with his determination of which buttons to press and when. This came to the forefront toward the end of the second quarter, when he came up well short on a three against Jayson Tatum, despite the fact that he was initially being guarded by and had just a few moments earlier knocked down a shot over Payton Pritchard.  

At halftime, Haliburton had seven points on just eight field-goal attempts to go with two assists. During a 2:30 span late in the fourth quarter, he nearly matched that same output, requiring only two shots -- one of which resulted in a four-point play. His takeover during the prior frame, in which he both absorbed and applied pressure while injecting pace back into the offense, certainly set the tone, given that he scored or assisted on 24 of the team's 27 points before the end of his shift; but, the dagger he drained from the top of the key, when he was also fouled, arguably best illuminates how he flipped the switch to turn off the lights on Boston.

To understand why, think back to the first half when Boston was sporadically assigning Luke Kornet to guard Bennedict Mathurin, with Jayson Tatum instead defending against Myles Turner at the five. As expected, for the sake of potentially sewing indecision with cross-matches and either switching on ball screens involving Turner or marginalizing Turner as the screener, that tactic became more prevalent as the game progressed, particularly during the fourth quarter. 

Here, for example, the Pacers are running their corner offense, which is triggered by a touch screen from a guard coming up out of the corner. Typically, that initial action is followed by a swing pass to the big at the top of the key to flow into a hand-off with a screen in the middle for Mathurin to attack with his defender trailing. In this case, however, Turner (somewhat inexplicably) attempted to turn the ball downhill against Tatum.

A few possessions later, though, Haliburton demonstrated the control he can still have on the offense even when he isn't directly at the controls. With Bruce Brown as the primary ball-handler, Haliburton is motioning for Mathurin and Turner to screen "away" for Nesmith. As Nesmith rifles the ball back to Brown, out of their spread high alignment, Haliburton sets a flare screen to occupy the help above the break. Consequently, when Turner slips against the switch from Tatum, Kornet is the only player available to tag, which sets the stage for Mathurin to attack the rim in space. 

Just to recap, as the star player, Haliburton just orchestrated where the advantage would be and distorted the coverage without ever touching the ball. By comparison to the airball that he coughed up against Tatum, the wheels are turning again -- and they're about to start spinning even faster. After all, the Pacers weren't the only team making in-game adjustments. When Kornet came out, Jrue Holiday started guarding up against Turner, effectively as a pre-switch, with Tatum sliding into his more natural role as a help defender on Mathurin. In turn, Nesmith ended up being where the five-man got stashed, which is why he was projected as the X-factor (and ended up being the X-factor), as he attacked the imperfect recovery angle out of drop coverage like his hair was on fire.

From there, Boston shifted to switching everything, so the play became a slot-to-slot flip for Nesmith to hand-off to the player in the corner. According to Second Spectrum, the Pacers rank fourth in drives per 100 possessions, compared to 29th for the Celtics. With the aquamarine-colored hardwood looking more like a body of water than a basketball court, Horford is fittingly pulled out to sea, tethered to Haliburton's mere presence at the logo with no one available to protect the rim against the secondary drive.  

In the end, after continuing to be aggressive even in his passiveness, all of the back-and-forth between both teams still culminated in Haliburton going from pulling the strings behind the scenes to, yet again, pulling the string as a shooter for himself. As he did for them, the Pacers returned the favor in thinking through the match-ups, wheeling around to remove Holiday from Turner so that Turner could screen for Haliburton with Horford, who would then get ghosted by Hield. 

With Haliburton rising up to fire out of the switch pocket, the blur from Hield also served to make blurry some of the process from the first half, as Haliburton also made one of his five triples even with Turner bringing Holiday to the ball out of the post. 

For that reason, in progressing to douse the lights with his first-ever triple-double in the first-ever In-Season Tournament quarterfinals against a whole host of coverages, TNT's spotlight wasn't too bright for Haliburton -- at least not when he was the lamplighter.