An ode to Tyrese Haliburton choosing magic (Patreon)

And seemingly always having an out 

By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper

Magic tricks don't always go to plan. Sometimes, with a sophisticated flourish, the wrong card   gets revealed and the gimmick awkwardly falls apart. The same can apply to basketball. Just ask Obi Toppin. On the season, Toppin ranks third among all players in two-point percentage, and he's converted 88 percent of his dunks, including a breathtaking, between-the-legs slam against the Cleveland Cavaliers, but his latest attempt to get fancy and wow the fans at his old stomping grounds wasn't quite as spellbinding. 

These things happen, which is why they are typically reserved for the All-Star Game -- where the risk-reward ratio of trying to conjure something out of nothing, or mishandling something and potentially ending up with nothing, favors the bold without the potential consequence of swinging a play in a game of consequence. Well, according to the calendar, the league's showcase of its brightest talent is still a week away, but that didn't stop Tyrese Haliburton from getting a jump on the next evolution of his jump pass with a self-alley-oop-kickout.

Coincidentally, on the same date and on the same court as when Kobe Bryant split a double-team and recovered the carom off the backboard between three defenders to assist Pau Gasol for a catch-and-shoot two, Haliburton deigned to put his own spin on a Kobe Assist.

Officially, according to the play-by-play, the sequence was merely logged as an assist from Haliburton to Siakam, but that doesn't exactly capture the fact that he pump faked on a three and stepped through to throw a jump pass off the backboard to himself, drawing in Precious Achiuwa, before jump passing AGAIN to find Siakam in the corner. By comparison, Kobe's sequence was also only logged as an assist to Gasol, rather than a missed shot followed by a rebound. Likewise, the same was also the case when Mathurin didn't notice that Siakam had a duck-in against Kentavius Caldwell-Pope and instead threw the ball to himself off the glass after getting Aaron Gordon in the air for a missed layup -- which is all that was marked down. 

At any rate, that sequence from Mathurin demonstrates the difficulty of tossing the ball at the exact right angle and with the forethought to be able to complete the play. Again, magic tricks don't always go to plan -- but, that's the thing: Tyrese Haliburton almost always has a plan or at the very least always has an out. For the season, he's grabbed 25 offensive rebounds. Of those rebounds, only eight have followed his own misses, none of which have been intentional. Still, his knack for jumping with an idea has at times melded with his rebounding -- even if only in small doses. Here, he touches the ball to Aaron Nesmith from the air and immediately starts motioning for the extra pass shortly after landing. 

Even so, there still isn't a precedent for the rabbit he pulled out of his hat (at the drop of a hat) against the Knicks -- regardless of what the sequence was logged as. To date, Haliburton has attempted 653 shots and missed 329 of them. According to PBP stats, Indiana has rebounded to hoist a shot on 52 of those misses, with only two of the attempts coming as corner threes -- neither of which were the direct product of passes from Haliburton. Two nights earlier, though, when he finished just 2-of-7 from the field in the blowout loss to the Golden State Warriors while at times appearing reluctant to shoot amid his ongoing return from injury, he used a shot fake but then didn't actually use the shot fake -- at least not for himself, as he passed out of the opportunity to get to the line, allowing Myles Turner to do so instead. 

In similar fashion, he also didn't seek out contact on his pump fake against the Knicks, but he chose magic. As Rick Carlisle said, Haliburton has the "resourcefulness in a split second to invent something special, and he did just that." 

Similar to the magician who stays one step ahead, calmly searching through a deck for a missing card only to suddenly pull it out from a hidden envelope as if it were there all along, Haliburton doesn't just decide how the trick should end; more often than not, he also knows what the ending will be. In that way, he can fly close to the sun a week early, completing the types of plays that are typically reserved for All-Star weekend, because his premeditated flights of fancy provide him with the maneuverability to reflect, for a moment in time, even the brightest lights at Madison Square Garden without as much chance of getting burned.