Tyrese Haliburton offered one of the more vulnerable injury updates of the NBA year when he explained that his recent physical changes were not the product of laziness, indifference, or some mysterious loss of discipline, but the result of a painful medical battle that has lingered far longer than he hoped.
“I’ve been taking unbelievable amounts of medication to try to get rid of [shingles]. It hasn’t worked. It’s obviously caused me to gain weight … That’s been a topic of conversation through social media.”
#Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton “lost part my eyebrow” due to face shingles:
“I’ve been taking unbelievable amounts of medication to try to get rid of it. It hasn’t worked. It’s obviously caused me to gain weight … That’s been a topic of conversation through social media …” pic.twitter.com/nRSpgnzjm6
— James Boyd (@RomeovilleKid) April 13, 2026
Haliburton has been recovering from a ruptured Achilles suffered in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, and on top of that rehab, the guard was also dealing with shingles.
Haliburton is clearly aware that people have noticed the weight gain and talked about it online, but his explanation is another reminder of how misleading surface-level judgments can be. Haliburton’s shingles case was extremely painful and unusually disruptive, with him also saying he lost part of an eyebrow because of it.
There is also a broader lesson in the way Haliburton chose to talk about it. Athletes are usually expected to keep recovery updates clean, upbeat, and vague. Haliburton did the opposite. He made the process sound ugly, exhausting, and public in all the wrong ways. That honesty matters, because it cuts against the illusion that injured stars simply disappear for a while and then return fully restored. Sometimes recovery is messy. Sometimes it changes how a player looks. Sometimes the body tells a story that outsiders are too quick to mock before they understand it.
For Haliburton, this is another layer in what has already been a brutal year away from the floor. But if there is something admirable in the quote, it is that he did not hide from the embarrassment or the discomfort. He explained it plainly. And in doing so, he turned a round of social-media chatter into something more useful: a reminder that not every visible change in an athlete’s body is a failure. Sometimes it is evidence of the fight you did not see.
