Tyrese Haliburton played basketball again Wednesday night, 472 days after his right Achilles tendon snapped in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals. He did it in Ames, Iowa, inside the building where he played college ball, wearing the No. 22 he wore for the Cyclones.
Indiana beat the Minnesota Timberwolves 123-112 in a preseason game at Hilton Coliseum. Haliburton logged 16 minutes and finished with seven points on 3-of-8 shooting, six assists, a steal and two blocks. Those 16 minutes were the entire story of the night.
The Homecoming Was the Whole Production
Haliburton bought out the Iowa State student section so students could get in free, and the school ran a lottery to hand out the tickets. Fans received commemorative shirts. He addressed the crowd before tip-off. “I think it’ll be fun for everybody,” he said beforehand, which undersold what the room turned into.
He tore the Achilles on June 22, 2025, against Oklahoma City, in the seventh game of a Finals that went the full distance. He then missed the entire 2025-26 season, and Indiana went 19-63 and finished 14th in the East with the 28th-ranked offense. That is what happens to a team built on pace and passing when you remove the passer.
What 16 Minutes Actually Tells You
Very little about the jumper and a lot about the plan. Six assists in 16 minutes means he was running the offense rather than parked on the wing collecting token minutes. A steal and two blocks means he was moving well enough laterally to be inside plays defensively, which is usually the last thing to come back after an Achilles rupture.
The 3-of-8 shooting is noise in October. The reasonable expectation for the season is patience, because players returning from this injury almost never resemble themselves in the first two months. The stretch that will tell Indiana what it has runs from Christmas through March, not from opening week.
That matters because the Pacers are not built to coast while they wait. They open the regular season on Oct. 21 against New Orleans, and everything about their offense assumes a lead guard who pushes pace and finds shooters before the defense sets. Nobody else on the roster does that job the way Haliburton does it.
Indiana has also changed around him. Ivica Zubac arrived at last season’s trade deadline and played only five games for the Pacers, so this is effectively his first real run with the group, and Kelly Oubre Jr. and Larry Nance Jr. were added over the summer for depth. Pascal Siakam, Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith, Obi Toppin and TJ McConnell are all still around from the Finals team. A 19-win season does not describe that roster, and a healthy Haliburton is the reason the gap exists.
There is one more thing worth saying plainly. No timeline for his minutes or his availability has been announced, and a seven-point preseason line in a college gym is not a promise about anything. What it does establish is that the rehab worked well enough for him to play a real NBA game against a playoff team, 16 months after an injury that has ended careers.
He picked a good place to do it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.