When Tyrese Haliburton shoots, his right hand almost cups the side of the ball. His right elbow is akimbo. He uses odd footwork, jabbing almost randomly, and sometimes skips and hops into his shots. In his shooting stance, his knees sometimes knock. He starts his shot with a quick little dip, then swings around, and barely sets. He flails left, falls right; like a little kid, he seems to chuck the ball toward the basket. It’s an almost embarrassing motion. It’s definitely embarrassing for the guys on the other team, when they see Haliburton skitter past them, jerk into a quick shot, and score.

He perplexes a lot of people. It is not his style to shoot much; he often prefers to direct the Pacers’ high-octane, relentless offense, which is among the best in the league. He touches the ball a lot—he had the second-most touches per game in the N.B.A. during the regular season, and, of the players in the N.B.A. Finals, he has the most touches by far—but the ball doesn’t stay in his hands for long. He doesn’t post up. He rarely looks to isolate a defender or create his own shot. He swings the ball across the floor, pushes the team in transition, and controls the chaos created by his speed and unpredictability. Although he is his team’s biggest star, he is not its leading scorer, and his usage rate—which estimates the percentage of offensive possessions a player is directly involved in while on the floor—was fourth among the Pacers’ rotation players this season. In contrast, the usage rate of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s top player, was among the highest in the whole league. Haliburton is no one’s idea of an N.B.A. superstar. He sometimes disappears in big games. And yet, in the most high-pressure moments, he becomes a supernova.

He is from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as in Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls. He played in college at Iowa State, where, during his freshman year, he was the sixth-leading scorer on his own team. The Ringer has called him a “walking analytics experiment” for his ability to space the floor, move the ball, and make everyone around him better. He was drafted by the Sacramento Kings, twelfth over all. In 2022, he was traded to the Indiana Pacers. There has been a lot of consternation lately about whether he is cool. (He is not.) There is some debate about whether he is even very good at basketball. (He is.) His peers famously voted him the league’s most overrated player. He was on the United States Olympic team, but he played the fewest minutes of anyone on the roster—and no minutes at all for half of the team’s six games. Afterward, he posted a selfie with the gold medal and wrote, “When you ain’t do nun on the group project and still get an A.”

During the playoffs, Haliburton has, in the final five seconds of games, tied the score or put his team in front four times. It has been a historic performance of clutch shooting. In that same span, he led his team to five comeback victories of fifteen points or more, including a game when the team was down by fourteen with less than three minutes to play. In the opener of the N.B.A. Finals, he played miserably, then hit a long jump shot to win the game, with less than half a second remaining. After struggling with the Thunder’s devastating defense during the first two games, in Game Three, he shot nine of seventeen from the field, including four of eight from behind the three-point line, in what was a comprehensive victory. He drove into swarming crowds of Thunder players, hit running floaters, and threw long, difficult pinpoint passes to seal the victory. He was one rebound away from a triple double. And in Game Four he and the Pacers had the Thunder—winners of sixty-eight games during the regular season—facing the prospect of going down in the series 3–1, after he drove to the basket and hit a layup to put Indiana up four with only a few minutes remaining, before the Thunder came back to even the series.

The word most often used to describe Haliburton is “corny.” He wears a big, goofy grin in his official photo, outlined by a thin, patchy mustache. On media day he wore Prada loafers with his uniform. He wore a floral suit to draft day; one stylist thought it was so bad he commented “LOL” on Instagram. Now that same stylist dresses Haliburton in Comme des Garçons suits, with bags from the Row. They FaceTime, and the stylist instructs Haliburton to fix his tie or sag his pants.

Haliburton says he doesn’t care when commentators criticize him. “Honestly, like, what do they really know about basketball?” he said after Game Three of the Finals. But it appears that he does, actually, care what people say. His trainer, Drew Hanlen, who has done wonders to help Haliburton elevate his game, has said that he uses trash talk to motivate him. After beating the New York Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals, Haliburton posted a lavishly produced video trolling Knicks fans. After the Olympics, he admitted that all those tweets counting his smiles hurt a lot. In recent weeks, there has been a spate of think pieces about the N.B.A.’s crisis of cool. Ratings are way down. The surging teams are from small television markets. They reek of earnestness. Everything is derivative. No one wants to take risks anymore.

The definition of risk, of course, is the exposure to danger or loss. No one plays with more risk than the Pacers. It’s possible to argue that they are not, strictly speaking, better than any of the teams they have faced in the playoffs, with the possible exception of the Milwaukee Bucks—and even the Bucks had the best player on the floor, in Giannis Antetokounmpo. It doesn’t matter. The point of a game isn’t to be “better” than the opponent, it’s to finish with the higher score.

The Pacers lost fifteen of their first twenty-five games this season. They seem to improve with every month, every series, even from game to game. They run more miles than other teams, and they play faster than other teams, on both offense and defense. They never seem to slow down, even when victory seems out of reach. That means victory is almost never out of reach. At the end of Game Three, even the young Thunder players, who never look tired, looked exhausted.

For much of Game Four, on Friday night, the Thunder continued to sputter, coughing up the ball and struggling to stay in front of driving players. That’s what the Pacers do: they wear people down. That’s what Haliburton has done to me, too. Is he cool? Does he have “aura,” as the kids like to ask these days? Is he a loser? What do those words even mean? Did they ever mean anything? I can’t help it any longer. When the game is on the line, I want to watch Tyrese Haliburton. With less than a minute to play on Friday, and the Pacers down by four, he darted with the ball above the arc, daring a drive with each step. The game was as good as over, and yet I still expected something miraculous to happen. There’s no more exciting sight right now than him with the ball. ♦