Some buildings hold grudges. Paycom Center held Tyrese Haliburton’s worst night in basketball, the place where his right Achilles gave way seven minutes into Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, and he had not set foot inside it since. On Tuesday night, Oct. 13, 2026, he walked back in wearing a Pacers uniform — and walked out looking like the All-NBA guard Indiana spent a season without.
Haliburton scored 24 points in 18 minutes of preseason action against the Oklahoma City Thunder, shooting 9-of-14 from the floor and 4-of-6 from three, with three assists and three rebounds, according to Yahoo Sports. He started the game a perfect 4-for-4 and poured in 11 points in the first quarter alone. The same building where his Finals ended in a single devastating step became the stage for his most convincing evidence yet that the injury is behind him.
He hadn’t even made the trip when the Pacers visited Oklahoma City during last season’s recovery year. This time, there was no avoiding the moment — and no shrinking from it.
From the crash site to full speed
The context makes the performance remarkable. Haliburton tore his Achilles in the first quarter of Game 7 on June 22, 2025, after a scorching start — nine points in seven minutes, 3-of-4 from deep, per Yahoo Sports. Indiana led early in that game before the injury, and the Thunder rolled on to the championship while Haliburton’s season, and Indiana’s next one, collapsed with him.
The Pacers went 19-63 in 2025-26, their fewest wins in franchise history, decimated by injuries and playing without the man who had carried them to back-to-back conference finals. Haliburton spent most of the year in Indianapolis, rehabbing, sitting on the bench for home and road games, watching a season unravel around a conversation that kept circling back to him.
His first taste of game action came a week earlier, and it was a homecoming of its own. On Oct. 7, the Pacers opened the preseason at Iowa State University in Ames, Haliburton’s college arena, where he hadn’t played in six years. Students camped out the night before for yellow shirts stamped with “Cyclone Hali.” He logged 16 minutes against the Minnesota Timberwolves, finishing with seven points and six assists in a 123-112 Indiana win.
“I was tired as hell,” he told ESPN afterward, laughing. “But even through that, I just kept feeling like, ‘Man, I’m playing again.'”
His first possession ended with a no-look pass sailing out of bounds, nerves announcing themselves. His second ended with a crossover into a 15-foot jumper alongside Pascal Siakam — his first basket in more than a year. By Tuesday in Oklahoma City, the rust was gone. The deep threes, the dribble penetration, the tempo: it all looked, as Yahoo Sports put it, like the All-NBA version fans remembered.
The year the recovery tested everything
The road back was harder than the highlight clips suggest. In his first vacation after surgery, a few months post-operation, Haliburton could barely manage the stairs of a rented house and needed help getting around. His surgeon had warned him; the reality still landed hard. He wept in the shower.
“Just having to come to terms with going from being on top of the world to the complete opposite of that in an instance,” Haliburton told ESPN.
Midway through the rehab came another blow: a bad case of shingles, a side effect of heavy medication that added 30 pounds and severe facial swelling, and — because the illness is highly contagious — kept him away from his teammates on the sideline. Another layer of isolation in a season already defined by it.
He filled the empty hours the way competitors often do, rewatching old highlights “just to feel something.” At one point he went back to the 2025 Finals themselves, and his mind kept snagging on Game 4, when the Pacers led the series 2-1 before Oklahoma City rallied from double digits down, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scoring 15 of his 35 points in the final 4:38.
“Game 4 will forever live in my brain,” Haliburton told ESPN. “You win that game, the whole series changes.”
Why the Pacers are so hard to read
Here is the strange part of Indiana’s 2026-27 outlook: a team that reached the conference finals in 2024 and 2025, and that won 19 games a year ago, enters the season projected by ESPN’s Basketball Power Index to finish 10th in the East with roughly 42 wins. Haliburton shrugs at the number.
“I don’t look too much into it,” he told ESPN. “Our whole team can relate to that. We’ve all felt that way one way or another.”
General manager Chad Buchanan sees the disrespect as fuel. “Finding that magic again, that’s no guarantee,” Buchanan told ESPN. “But our core guys believe in each other. They feel like people have written them off already. That’s what’s happened those two years we made runs — people just kind of discarded us. That’s what fuels them.”
The roster has been reshaped around its returning star. Indiana added center Ivica Zubac this offseason, per Yahoo Sports, a move that gives Haliburton a legitimate lob target and screen partner as the Pacers try to reestablish the pace-and-space identity that made them the last team to beat the eventual champion New York Knicks in a playoff series.
Haliburton, for his part, has not lowered the bar one inch.
“I have my own internal expectations,” he told ESPN. “But our goal is to win a championship. That has never wavered.”
More than a basketball comeback
What stands out from Haliburton’s year away is how much of it he spent rooted in Indianapolis rather than detached from it. Weeks before training camp, he visited children at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital as a spokesperson for the Indiana Donor Network, sitting through a spirited debate about favorite colors with five young kidney transplant recipients. Earlier in the summer, he helped revitalize the Pacers’ charity softball game, drawing Colts and Fever players and a packed house to Victory Field, the 12,000-seat downtown ballpark.
“It’s a different perspective on life now,” he told ESPN. “I’m just thankful to be playing basketball again and to be doing all the different things that I can do in the community because when something like that happens, it’s like your life flashes before your eyes.”
The Midwest connection runs deep. Born in Wisconsin, proposed to in Ames, traded to Indiana in 2022 — his wife Jade was at his side through the recovery, including the hospital visit where she deadpanned “Knicks colors” after spotting orange and blue on a child’s drawing of a Pacers jersey.
What comes next for Indiana
Two preseason games in, the sample is small but loud. Seven points and six assists in Ames. Twenty-four points on 14 shots in Oklahoma City. The Eastern Conference is deeper than the one Indiana left behind, and no preseason line against a Thunder team resting its regulars proves anything about June. Haliburton knows better than anyone how quickly a season can pivot on a single play.
But the questions that mattered most this month — would the burst return, would the shot fall, would the building where it all ended feel like a graveyard — have been answered, at least for now. The Pacers open the regular season with their star healthy, their core intact, and a chip on their shoulder that management says has been there all along.
“Everybody always feels the summer is really long,” Haliburton told ESPN. “Well, I’ve had that for double, triple the amount of time everybody else.”
Sixteen months later, the wait is over. The rest of the East has been warned.
FAQ
When did Tyrese Haliburton return to play after his Achilles injury?
He made his return on Oct. 7, 2026, in the Pacers’ preseason opener at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, playing 16 minutes against the Minnesota Timberwolves and finishing with seven points and six assists in a 123-112 win.
Where did Tyrese Haliburton tear his Achilles?
He tore his right Achilles in the first quarter of Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals at Paycom Center in Oklahoma City, after scoring nine points in the game’s first seven minutes.
How did Haliburton perform in his return to Oklahoma City?
On Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026, he scored 24 points in 18 minutes of preseason action at Paycom Center, shooting 9-of-14 from the field and 4-of-6 from three, with three assists and three rebounds.
How did the Pacers do without Haliburton last season?
Indiana went 19-63 in 2025-26, the fewest wins in franchise history, while Haliburton spent the season recovering from the injury.