Halliburton: From overrated to miracle creator!

Looking back at the 2024-25 playoffs, if you want to choose a player who is impressive enough, I think Halliburton is definitely the best choice.

got rid of the trough of the season, and Halliburton led the Pacers to a proud record of 34 wins and 14 losses from early January, and handed in 18.6 points, 3.5 rebounds, 9.2 assists and 1.4 steals throughout the season. As the team commander, the assist-loss ratio is an absolutely high level of 5.61. Compared with the same data, Chris Paul, who ranks second, is only 4.69.

If we subdivided further, Halliburton's statistics are as follows:

0 mistakes in a single game: 10 games, 7 wins and 3 losses in a single game: 30 games, 19 wins and 11 losses in a single game: 2 mistakes in a single game: 18 games, 10 wins and 8 losses in a single game: 9 games, 6 wins and 3 losses in a single game: 2}

4 mistakes in a single game: 3 games, 1 wins and 2 losses in a single game: 3 games, 3 wins and 0 losses in a single game: 1} Last year, the Pacers played all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals, but were swept out by the Celtics. At that time, most people from the outside world thought they were just lucky. This year they returned to the playoffs again, constantly making unexpected performances and constantly slapped people who underestimated them. In the fifth round of the playoffs, Halliburton made a layup and led the team to advance 4-1 with a big score; in the second round, facing the Cavaliers, after Halliburton missed the second free throw, he grabbed an offensive rebound in the chaos army, dribbled the ball to the top of the arc, faced Jerome one-on-one single-handed, and retreated and made a final three-pointer.

In the last moment of regular time in the first match against the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals, Halliburton pushed the ball into the frontcourt, almost dropped the ball when breaking through, and then quickly returned to the three-point line and turned around and jumped in, the lights turned on. Both sides experienced overtime, and the Pacers finally took away the first victory in the series with a 3-point advantage.

In the fourth game of the Eastern Conference Finals, Halliburton performed well, with 32 points, 12 rebounds, 15 assists and 0 mistakes in the game, becoming the first player in history to achieve this in the playoffs. At the same time, this is also the 11th time in his career that he has made 15 assists and 0 mistakes in a single game.

came to the finals stage, and another miracle was staged when most people were not optimistic about them. Halliburton contributed a 0.3-second jump shot at the last moment and led the team to reverse and win the first game of the finals.

Perhaps because we were fed up with the disapproval of everyone, Halliburton said in a post-match interview:

"After playing such a season last year, the outside world's reaction was that we shouldn't have played that far, and we thought we were lucky to go to the Eastern Conference Finals, but we were confused. This made all of us angry all the entire offseason."

"When the season started this year, it was very touching and we were still saying that we had good luck last year. The season started In the first few months, we played very badly again, so we were naturally ridiculed and criticized, but everyone in our team was very attentive to this matter, and everyone was, and the coach would deliberately let us know what the outside world was talking about us again. "

Time Fast forward to the situation where the finals were 2-3 behind. Halliburton, who was injured, took the initiative to attack many times at the beginning, driving the whole team to actively attack. He did not hesitate when he had a mobile phone and equalized the big score of the series in just three quarters.

But unfortunately, the Pacers didn't end up with the finals ending with Halliburton's fall. But even so, the touching Halliburton and the Pacers brought to fans is the most irreplaceable scenery in this year's finals.

There is a championship team every season, but most fans usually only remember who is the final champion team, but this year may be different. Even if they fail, many fans will still remember this Pacers that were not favored from the beginning.