Cleveland's home crowd was caught chanting "overrated" at Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton during the second quarter of Game 2 Tuesday night. Donovan Mitchell, performing heroically for a severely depleted Cavaliers squad that was at that moment up 10 points, made an effort to discourage the chanting, but it persisted long enough to be picked up by TNT's microphones. This was a minor miracle: The production quality Tuesday was somehow even worse than it was Sunday. Greg Anthony's diving bell was even deeper into the Mariana Trench; the berserk home crowd's teeth-rattling clamor was reduced to an occasional slithering and shuffling; a bizarrely tuned courtside microphone managed to pick up no sound except for one Cavs fan screaming "bullshit" at key whistles. But the mics sure picked up that "overrated" chant. It's not that this is bad crowd behavior—it is, in fact, good and appropriate crowd behavior when facing a divisional foe in the playoffs—but it turned out that this was an unfortunate night to be caught on the record mocking Indiana's point guard.
Haliburton was quiet for most of the night, but it was generally the good kind of quiet, a biding of time that suited the contours of the game. The Cavs, still without Darius Garland but now also without top perimeter defender De'Andre Hunter plus literal Defensive Player of the Year Evan Mobley, ramped up their defensive intensity, threw their deeply unsexy point-of-attack defenders way the hell up the floor, and helped on dribble penetration like absolute demons. The effort and precision of it all was downright stirring to watch, and it flustered several of Indiana's ball-handlers, and before the Pacers had developed anything like an offensive rhythm the scoreboard showed them down 20 points. Presumably the crowd was losing it, though I will need someone who was there in person to confirm this.
Over and over again in the first half, someone like Pascal Siakam or Andrew Nembhard or T.J. McConnell would try to run by an isolated Cavs defender of no particular repute, bounce off that defender's armpit, cross over and attempt to run by their other shoulder, wind up stuffed inside a second armpit, and reflexively attempt to spin back the other way. When I say that the defensive help was on point, buddy, I mean that it may not be possible to arrive in a helping position with better timing. It was as if the Cavs had somehow been drilling the exact dribble sequences of these exact opponents for approximately seven jillion lifetimes. Gigantic prescient space-worm-ass Leto Atreides II could not more precisely anticipate an opponent's maneuvers. The very instant that a Pacers ball-handler went into a dribble counter, usually around the free-throw line, a second Cavs defender would appear out of nowhere, both to form up a wall and to throw their hands at the panicked dribbler's attempt at a kick-out pass. It was spooky.
Somehow Cleveland's defense got even more disruptive after Jarrett Allen, one of basketball's very best defensive players, picked up his second foul and went to the bench, with about three minutes left in the first quarter. Allen sat for about six minutes of action, spanning the quarter break; the Cavs went small and used second-year guy Javonte Green; and during these minutes the Pacers turned the ball over six times and attempted—attempted—just five total shots, including zero at the rim. There was a sequence of Indiana possessions where McConnell alone did roughly 900 consecutive wrong things, almost entirely due to underestimating the capabilities of the defenders in front of him.
I'm focusing on this now because, truly, Kenny Atkinson and the Cavaliers deserve credit and admiration, not just in a Cool Runnings–ish Wow it's great that they didn't die underdog sort of way, but for being unbelievably fucking good at organized basketball. Cleveland ran out a starting lineup of Mitchell, Allen, Ty Jerome, Dean Wade, and Max Strus. These are all good-to-very-good basketball players, but that is not a lineup that you would expect to start for a team that wins 45 regular-season games, let alone finds itself hosting a series in the second round of the playoffs. Even worse than the effect on Cleveland's high-use lineups is what the loss of Garland, Mobley, and Hunter does to the team's bench. You can get by in a game with that starting lineup if you have, well, Jerome, Wade, and Hunter also coming off the bench. Instead Cleveland had to press defense-only-ass Isaac Okoro into heavy minutes, avoid collapse with Green jammed into a rotation spot, and hold their breath through first-half minutes for Craig Porter Jr., a lightly used second-year guy who saw only a few blips of garbage time in Cleveland's first-round demolition of the Miami Heat.
And they almost won the game! Greg Anthony spent a good chunk of the first quarter fretting over whether Mitchell would have to shoulder too heavy an offensive burden Tuesday night, but the real downgrade came at the other end. Wade, Strus, and Jerome are vulnerable defenders, the kinds of players who can be pulled out and exploited in certain matchups. Wade is a floor-spacer, Strus is a bomber, Jerome is a pot-stirrer. If anything, Mitchell's offensive responsibilities could've decreased, when what the Cavs needed more desperately than ever was a designated perimeter stopper. Or at least that's how it looked on paper, and then through most of the first half the various slow-footed and overextended Cavs fellas were so unbelievably tenacious on the ball and their rotations were so frighteningly precise that at one point, after another McConnell live-ball turnover, I quickly scanned the floor for an open Pacer and said aloud in my living room, "Where the hell are they coming from?" This was great!
Rick Carlisle summed it up coachily after the first quarter, when the Cavs were way the hell out in front and the Pacers looked like they'd been run through a high-speed tumble cycle. "This is the power of hard play, and they're the ones that are carrying the day," he said, looking lightly disgusted. "We've got to play harder, we've got to play with more force."
Maybe it's me, but I didn't detect a dramatic shift in force. Some of the stabilizing that took place in the second quarter, I thought, had to do with Cleveland relying a little too heavily on Mitchell's solo heroics and thus finishing too many possessions with bricks, which allowed Indiana to do a little more zipping in semi-transition. Importantly, the Pacers stopped trying to force their way to the cup with straight-line drives, which cut down on their turnovers and ensured that more of their own possessions ended with, you know, shots. Those shots were not always of the highest quality—amazingly, Indiana completed one (1) shot from within nine feet in the entire second quarter, and only three in the entire first half—but they were at least shots, and the Pacers have enough versatility to generate respectable offense from lots of different players stationed in lots of different parts of the floor.
But Indiana proving that they could continue breathing air was not the same thing as a true swing in momentum. The Cavaliers still led, by a lot, through most of the third quarter. They were up 17 in the final seconds of the frame when Indiana ran a sweet hook-and-ladder–type inbounds play off a made Cavs free throw, releasing Haliburton for a sprint up the court. Haliburton was sitting on eight points; he'd thus far attempted just four shots all game. Another player of his profile, feeling stifled and desperate, might've charged at the basket, looking for some catharsis and a friendly whistle, maybe an and-one bucket to grab some momentum, or at least some personal validation. Haliburton sprinted long enough to pull in the last defender back, and then zipped a one-handed pass to the far corner, where Aaron Nesmith was able to take and make an uncontested three-pointer.
I think that's a good example of Haliburton's style as a playmaker. Sometimes you wish he would assert himself a little more aggressively, and then you watch him throw gooey-slow setup dribbles at some ho-hum switch defender and remember that he doesn't always have that particular kind of juice, or anyway not very much of it. He can't John Wall his way into the paint, nor can he Andre Miller his way, keister first, to the low block. While we're here, he also can't fly around screens like Steph Curry or descend from the clouds like Ja Morant, and he even lacks the shot versatility to go full Damian Lillard. This is the substance of those "overrated" chants: There's plenty that Haliburton cannot do on a basketball court, and when you see him kind of disappear into the action of a game going the opponent's way, it can be easy to convince yourself that his All-Star status comes down to people casting around for a conventional explanation for why the Indiana Pacers matter in the narrative of a season. It can be easy to think that the real All-Star in Indiana is, like, Rick Carlisle, or a stagnant Eastern Conference, or possibly the friends we made along the way.
Maybe there's something to that, but not much. Anyway, Haliburton skeptics will have to go quiet for at least the next few days. He came alive in the fourth quarter, dumping in 11 points on seven shots to lead a huge 36-point explosion for the lower-seeded Pacers. When the game turned horrendous in the final minutes, Haliburton kept his cool. The margin was still seven points when Carlisle took a timeout with just over a minute to go. Haliburton beat Okoro to the cup for a clutch quick score, but the Cavs came right back and made it seven again with some Mitchell free throws. Haliburton drove decisively and dished Siakam into some free throws of his own, but Siakam bricked both. Nesmith, stationed out near half court, knifed all the way to the rim for a vicious put-back dunk on Siakam's second miss, and smushed Mitchell in the process. The lead was five.
After a painful-looking collision and a second annoyingly long replay inside of 10 seconds of game time, the Pacers benefited from a turnover. Haliburton got stoned pretty good trying in vain to exploit what for lots of quicker guards would be a murderously unfair positional mismatch, but the Pacers retained possession and managed a bucket on the inbounds. The margin was still three points, with just 27.5 seconds left in regulation. With Indiana down to a single timeout, the Cavs were any points at all or even just one longer-than-absolutely-necessary possession away from the win.
Atkinson and Strus will spend the rest of their days wanting back the moments to follow. Atkinson called a timeout to advance the ball and to draw up a play, but the play produced precisely zero good passing angles, Indiana defended the hell out it, and Strus eventually lobbed a deeply regrettable jump-ball toward the paint, where Nembhard easily won a tussle with Jerome and hauled in the interception. The dreaded live-ball turnover set up the game's final sequence:
Haliburton waved away a switch, thank God. He liked the matchup with lead-footed Jerome and preferred the floor spaced just so, with Myles Turner in the corner and Allen tugged away from the paint, and with the diminutive Mitchell stationed as the last line of defense. Haliburton cleanly beat his defender and absorbed contact at the rim to draw a foul; the Cavs hated the whistle and protested, and it was a very soft call, but also refs make this call all the time. There's even an argument to be made—certainly it would be made by Mark Daigneault—that fouling was the right move, and that Mitchell's mistake was to not foul harder, because he was supremely lucky that Haliburton's layup didn't fall for the and-one.
"I was pissed I missed the layup because I couldn’t hang onto the ball," recalled Haliburton after the game. It was in that state of pissed-offedness that Haliburton yanked down the rebound of his own missed free throw, with the Pacers still down two and the clock ticking. What stands out to me from this sequence is Haliburton's calm under enormous time pressure. He brings the ball down in heavy traffic but with enough presence of mind to back out for a full reset, triggering Indiana's offense with about the usual eight seconds that teams generally like for a final possession. Once again he had the familiar defender; once again he liked what he saw. "I backed it out, I just saw Ty Jerome, top of the key, and knocked it down."
This was the second time in eight nights that the Pacers have erased a seven-point lead inside of the final minute of a playoff game. In both cases, Haliburton killed the opponent with a go-ahead and game-winning bucket inside the game's final two seconds.
"You don’t see this very often, let alone twice in one week," said Carlisle, who acknowledged Indiana's extremely good luck in Tuesday's game. "Tyrese, he came through again."
Haliburton finished the game Tuesday with just 19 points, but on 7-for-11 shooting, plus nine rebounds, four assists, and zero turnovers. This might not be the eye-popping line you want from a playoff superhero—Mitchell, in defeat, had 48 points on 30 shots—but the proof of the pudding, as George Carlin would say, is in the eating: The Pacers won the game, which after all is the point of playing it. They now need to win just two of five, with severe home-court advantage, in order to advance to their second consecutive Eastern Conference Finals. What more could anyone ask for?
By all means, chant at Haliburton for the things he cannot do. I guess I will be over here in nerd town, appreciating how calmly he resists the temptation to prove himself, and how that refusal preserves his best for those moments when a little bit of heroism is required. A little goes a long way.
