Tyrese Haliburton’s ankle tweak is not the kind of news that should send the Indiana Pacers into panic mode, but it is the sort of thing that gets your attention.
Indiana was back on the floor Saturday, October 10th, for a preseason game against the Atlanta Hawks, and Haliburton was not with them. The reason: a tweaked ankle that will keep him out of the next few preseason games after his return on his home campus at Iowa State against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
That kind of injury usually does not call for alarm. An ankle issue is about as common as it gets, and there is no sense in pushing through it just to log preseason minutes and risk turning a small problem into a bigger one.
The important part is that this does not appear to be something that changes the Pacers’ regular season outlook. It is not the sort of injury that removes Haliburton from Indiana’s plans, and it does not suddenly alter who this team is supposed to be. For better or worse, the Pacers go as Haliburton goes, and he will do that regardless of how his ankle feels in early October.
Still, there is a reason this lands with some unease in Indiana. Pacers fans lived through last season watching the roster collect one little setback after another, all while the team tried to hold together a rotation and keep moving. That experience makes any fresh injury note feel heavier than it otherwise would.
And the stakes are obvious. Indiana cannot afford another lost season, and last year made one thing painfully clear: this team does not function without Tyrese Haliburton. So even if this is minor, it is hard not to think about how fragile the whole picture can feel when a player this central is dealing with any kind of setback.
That concern gets sharper when you look at Haliburton’s track record before the Achilles tear. He was a fairly steady presence for most of his career, playing 58 games as a rookie and then 77, 69, and 73 games in 2021, 2023, and 2024. It makes sense that his healthiest season also turned out to be his best year in the playoffs and, by accolades, his biggest year overall.
That was also the year Indiana made its biggest leap.
If the Pacers are going to get back to the Finals, Haliburton is going to have to drive it. If Haliburton is going to be the face of a new chapter in Pacers basketball, or even a continuation of the old one, he has to be on the floor.
The old line that “the best ability is availability” has always felt a little too tidy, but the point behind it is hard to ignore. You can only build around a player, and judge everything else they bring, when that player is actually out there. The ability to play matters because everything else depends on it.
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