Tyrese Haliburton knew the risk of stepping onto the floor during the NBA Finals with a strained calf, but even after the worst-case scenario came true, he refuses to second-guess himself.
“It’s the Finals, man. I’ve worked my whole life to be here and I want to be out there to compete. Help my teammates any way I can,” Haliburton said before Game 6, per Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast.
After aggravating the injury and suffering a torn Achilles early in Game 7, Haliburton admitted he had plenty of people urging him to stop before it reached that point. “I had some close friends, family, and mentors in my life call me after Game 5 and say, ‘Hey, shut it down,’” he said.
When asked if he wished he had listened to that advice, Haliburton did not hesitate.
“No. Hell no. Hell no. I’ll be honest—I called KD after I got my MRI after Game 5,” Haliburton said. “I said, ‘Bro, do you regret playing in the game you tore [your Achilles]?’ He said, ‘No, not at all.’ He said, ‘You never…’ I was like, ‘Alright.’ Yeah, I wasn’t going to switch anyway, so I’m glad he said that,” Haliburton told Impaulsive. “It made me feel a little bit better. But no, I don’t regret it, bro.”
The injury will sideline the 24-year-old guard for the entire 2025-26 season. “It would be 15 months from the injury before I’d play in a game again,” he explained, aligning with Indiana’s public timeline.
Despite the devastating blow, Haliburton has kept a sense of humor. When asked about conspiracy theories claiming the NBA is rigged, he laughed.
“Well, the problem is, I play for the Indiana Pacers,” he said. “So, if the NBA was going to rig the league, the last two teams they’d probably rig it for would be the Indiana Pacers and the Oklahoma City Thunder.”
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