On Friday, the Indiana Pacers returned to Oklahoma City for the first time since the night their season ended and Tyrese Haliburton’s did, too. The rematch with the Thunder had all the natural hooks, Finals flashbacks, a loud building, a banner still fresh in the rafters, but one detail quietly changed the emotional temperature: Haliburton wasn’t there.
Taylor Rooks said Haliburton told her he didn’t travel with the team because he wasn’t ready to return to the site of his Game 7 injury.
“It’s something [Haliburton] still thinks about for sure,” Rooks relayed. “He wants the next time he goes back to be when he can play.”
Taylor Rooks says Tyrese Haliburton told her he didn’t travel with the Pacers for their game against the Thunder because he wasn’t ready to return to the site of his Game 7 injury: “It’s something [Haliburton] still thinks about for sure. He wants the next time he goes back to be… pic.twitter.com/FgmjsIGD0g
— MrBuckBuck (@MrBuckBuckNBA) January 24, 2026
On one level, it’s a simple personal decision, an injured star choosing not to take an emotional lap through the place where everything snapped. On another, it’s a reminder of what that moment in June actually was: not just a torn Achilles, but a rupture in the narrative of a franchise that had the Finals in its hands and then watched the floor swallow its engine.
Haliburton’s injury occurred early in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, when he went down in obvious pain in Oklahoma City. Indiana’s hopes collapsed with him, and the Thunder went on to win the championship. In July, the Pacers confirmed the practical consequence of that scene: Haliburton would miss the entire 2025–26 season while recovering from Achilles surgery.
Haliburton had attended every Pacers game this season until this trip – Friday’s matchup in Oklahoma City, their first visit since the Finals. The detail matters because it frames the decision not as a random day off, but as a specific emotional exception.
And if you’ve ever watched an athlete process injury publicly, you recognize the logic immediately: returning to the place is part of the healing, but it’s also a trigger. Haliburton is choosing control. He’s choosing the terms of the return. He’s choosing to make the next trip to OKC about basketball, not trauma.
The Pacers, meanwhile, still had to play the game. And they played it well. Indiana beat Oklahoma City 117–114 in a Finals rematch that functioned as a kind of proof-of-life for a team forced to redefine itself without its All-NBA guard. Andrew Nembhard scored 27 and Jarace Walker added a career-high 26, according to ESPN’s recap, as the Pacers withstood a late Thunder push.
The win was real. But Haliburton’s absence was the story that lingered, because it spoke to the part of sports that box scores can’t touch: the interior cost. Achilles rehabs are brutal physically, but they also rearrange a player’s relationship with time, weeks measured by pain thresholds and progress markers, not schedules and road trips. For someone like Haliburton, whose game is built on rhythm, pace, and orchestration, the distance from the floor can feel like distance from self.
There’s also something quietly revealing about the way Rooks phrased it. Haliburton “still thinks about” the injury. Of course he does. Anyone who watched him go down in Game 7 remembers the reaction, how immediate it was, how unmistakably it read as disaster. Players carry those moments like scars. The public sees the highlight and the diagnosis; the player remembers the sensation, the sound, the split second where the body sends a message the mind doesn’t want to believe.
So when Haliburton says he wants the next time he goes back to be when he can play, it isn’t superstition. It’s a form of agency. It’s him refusing to be reduced to the injury site. It’s him saying: I will return to that building on my terms, as a participant, not as a ghost.
This is also, quietly, a compliment to his own competitiveness. He could have traveled, sat behind the bench, smiled for cameras, done the “we’re all together” optics. Instead he chose honesty: not ready. That kind of transparency is rare in a league where players are trained to sand down emotion into “day-to-day” and “next man up.”
