INDIANAPOLIS — Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Tyrese Haliburton and the Pacers are now feeling the passion of the Knicks’ praise. (He’d probably prefer a nice note, or an Edible Arrangement, or something.)
For the first time in the 2025 Eastern Conference finals, New York took a page out of Indiana’s book in Game 5, applying defensive pressure on the opponent’s All-NBA ball-handler in the backcourt rather than allowing him to bring the ball up the floor unabated and get the Pacers into their offense:
The tactical adjustment by Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau didn’t shock Haliburton, who’s seen more than his fair share of 94-foot defensive affection from opposing defenses throughout his rise to stardom in Indiana — especially given the elevated stakes at which these two teams are playing, with a berth in the 2025 NBA Finals on the line.
“I mean, we’re up 3-1. Their season’s on the line,” Haliburton said after the Knicks’ 111-94 win in Game 5 to extend this series, forcing a Game 6 back at Gainbridge Fieldhouse at 8 p.m. ET on Saturday night. “So we understand they’re going to come out and play hard, increase their pressure, and do whatever they’ve got to do to win. They did a great job of that, and now it’s on us to respond in Game 6.”
How the Pacers — and Haliburton specifically — respond will likely determine whether Indiana clinches its first NBA Finals berth since 2000, or finds itself once again boarding a plane bound for New York to face Game 7 at Madison Square Garden come Monday.
Games 4 and 5 offered a pretty perfect snapshot of the yin and yang of Haliburton’s game. On one night, he’s flawless, overwhelming, all-consuming, suffusing every Pacer possession with electricity and efficiency. He injects the energy into the game, making monster waves and then surfing atop them as they crash over a helpless defense. And on the next, because of the unerring purity of his offensive approach — “You know, he’s a point guard by nature,” head coach Rick Carlisle said before Game 3, “a classic point guard by nature, a guy running a team” — Haliburton can find himself getting swept away with the tide.
“Yeah, rough night for me,” said Haliburton, who finished with just eight points (his second-fewest of the postseason, and his 13th single-digit game of the season) on just seven field goal attempts (just the fifth time all season he’s taken so few). “I gotta be better setting the tone, getting downhill. I feel like I didn’t do a good job of that.”
The numbers back up Haliburton’s self-assessment. After averaging nearly 11 drives to the basket per game during the regular season, more than 11 per game through the first two rounds of the playoffs, and 13 a game through the first four games against New York, he logged only nine in Game 5, leading to just two baskets, one drawn foul and zero assists.
“Sometimes, it was probably a combination of him missing some shots he normally makes,” Thibodeau said after the game. “But I thought our guys were tied together, trying to make him work for everything. That’s what you have to do. We have to fight to win every possession.”
A lot of the credit for Haliburton’s quieter performance belongs to Mikal Bridges. The Knicks swingman turned in his strongest defensive game of the series with precisely that kind of fight-to-win-every-possession approach, deploying both his length and seemingly limitless gas tank to shadow Haliburton the full length and width of the court with more physicality, intention and presence than he’d managed through the first four games.
“Mikal did a great job,” Knicks forward Josh Hart said. “We’re asking a lot from ’Kal. He’s picking him up, running around with him. Tyrese is someone who never really stops moving. He’ll bring the ball down, he’ll hit, he’ll run off of it, he’ll get the [ball] back, he’ll throw it back to the big, he’ll run back. ’Kal did a great job today trying to be physical, trying to be on his body and not give him anything easy.”
Combine that with more attentive positioning by big men Mitchell Robinson and Karl-Anthony Towns, loading into the gaps to stop the ball and prevent Haliburton from consistently touching the paint, and better communication behind the play by New York’s help defenders, and you’ve got a recipe for throwing a little bit of sand in the gears of what’s largely been a smoothly humming Pacers offensive machine:
Part of the problem stemmed from the Knicks’ evolving understanding of the logic by which the Pacers’ particular machine operates.
As soon as Haliburton saw Bridges picking him up full-court, he did what his classic, natural, pure point guard brain understood to be the next right thing, the proper prescribed play: getting off the ball early and trying to leverage Bridges’ one-on-one face-guarding coverage by moving out of the play, creating the opp for his teammates to attack 4-on-4.
It’s a strategy the Pacers have employed for the past couple of seasons when teams have tried to get in Haliburton’s kitchen like this, including in Round 2 against the Cavaliers; it’s one of the reasons why Andrew Nembhard, Haliburton’s backcourt partner, is finishing nearly nine possessions per game in this postseason as a pick-and-roll ball-handler, according to Synergy Sports. It’s something that Indiana knows full well how to attack and exploit.
Or, at least, that it does most of the time. In this specific matchup, and at this specific stage of it, pulling the right levers might be a little trickier.
See, three games ago, the Knicks changed their starting lineup, moving Hart — Nembhard’s primary defender in Games 1 and 2 — to the bench and Robinson into the first five. That decision shook a lot of things up: With Robinson slotting in against Pacers center Myles Turner, Towns bumped down to power forward and slid over to defend opposing 4 Pascal Siakam … which, in turn, slid Siakam’s man, OG Anunoby, over to Nembhard.
In Games 1 and 2, Nembhard averaged 13.5 points and three assists per game on 61.1% shooting. Since the shift? Just six points per game on 5-for-26 shooting (19.2%) and 2.3 helpers a night. Turns out it might be tougher to run offense through your secondary ball-handler when he’s guarded by a 6-foot-7, 235-pound All-Defensive Team-caliber stopper — especially one who’s perfectly comfortable switching onto Turner if you want to run some 2-5 pick-and-roll, and whose multipositional flexibility makes him an ideal choice to scram-switch any teammate (including the frequently targeted Jalen Brunson) out of a potentially damaging matchup created out of that 4-on-4 realignment.
With Bridges’ pressure and Haliburton’s response to relieve it minimizing the effectiveness of Plan A, and Anunoby-on-Nembhard effectively scuttling its Plan B, the Pacers were left to try to scrounge up points elsewhere. Sometimes, they were successful: a Siakam turnaround fadeaway over Towns; a T.J. McConnell pull-up 3; a tough driving runner by Turner; Bennedict Mathurin creating in isolation on his way to a team-high 23 points.
You have to live with something, though, and the Knicks would much rather live with Obi Toppin and Jarace Walker trying to create one-on-one than Haliburton manipulating the chessboard. When everybody else has to try to make plays, you can get outcomes like 40.5% shooting for the best-shooting team in the playoffs, and just 20 assists against 20 turnovers — both the Pacers’ worst showings of the postseason.
That’s clearly not the game script that Carlisle wants. The challenge ahead of Game 6? Writing another one.
One that can find fresh weaknesses in the Knicks’ shifted approach, and maybe a way to restore Nembhard’s auxiliary function despite the Anunoby matchup. One that can get Siakam (15 points on 5-for-13 shots in Game 5) back to the kind of game-plan-wrecking monster he was in Game 2 — and, ideally, get the Pacers back to Plan A: Haliburton conducting the symphony.
“As a team, we have to be aggressive, and we have to have a level of balance,” Carlisle said after Game 5. “I mean, I’ll look at it. There’s more things I’m going to have to do to help him, and so, I’ll take responsibility for that and we’ll see where we can improve.”
The Knicks will have to be ready for those improvements: for changes in tempo, in angle of attack and, perhaps most importantly, in sheer physical force. To whatever degree Indiana let off the gas in Game 5, knowing that it had two more chances to sew this series up, you can bet that the pedal will once again be mashed firmly to the floor in Game 6. The Knicks are playing for their lives; if they want the Pacers to join them, they’ll have to not just replicate that defensive effort, but crank it up even further.
“We have to, you know? I mean, we have to,” Towns said after Game 5. “We have no more room for error. Our backs are against the wall, and every game is do or die. So if we don’t bring that energy, if we don’t bring that execution, our season will be over.”
The Knicks’ counterpunch kept them alive. Haliburton exited Game 5, though, confident in his team’s ability to parry, and punch its ticket to Oklahoma City.
“After a game like that, we understand what the stakes are, and we understand the conversation, what it will be around our group,” Haliburton said. “But we’re fine. We’re fine. There’s no need to panic or anything. … I think the great part about this group and our staff is, everybody’s addicted to film study and figuring out where we can get better. Coach Carlisle’s a savant at that stuff. After a game like that, I know he’s gonna be all over the film, I’m gonna be all over the film, and we’ll be talking a lot.”
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