Indiana Pacers News: All-Star Reflects on Brutal Flaw in Recent Play

Two-time Indiana Pacers All-Star point guard Tyrese Haliburton seems to have lost his shooting touch of late. A January hamstring injury that caused him to miss ten games seemed to slow his offensive roll, but things really got bad in March.

This month, he's connecting on just 26.5% of his 7.3 three-point attempts. According to The Athletic's Sam Amick and Joe Vardon, that's his worst shooting month across his four-season pro career to date. For the season, he's averaging 36.5% on his 7.7 triple tries a night. Prior to this year, he had never shot below 40% from beyond the arc on a volume amount of attempts (5.1 is his prior low).

Before his January 30 return from the hamstring ailment, Haliburton had been averaging 23.6 points and 12.5 assists through his first 33 contests of the season. Since then, those numbers have dipped to 16.2 points and 9.3 dimes.

"Ebbs and flows like this happen in the season, (but) this is the longest ebb and flow I've ever dealt with in my life," Haliburton told Amick and Vardon. "I think being true to who I am (is the key), and everything else will take care of itself."

"I feel like the way that I played, especially before the injury, when I was one of the best guys in the league at closing games, that's who I am," Haliburton said. "And that's who I'll continue to be. But I think I just want everything right now. I want to get back to playing my best basketball right now, you know?"

Head coach Rick Carlisle has his own theory about the cause of Haliburton's decline in effective three-point shooting. And that's the addition of Pascal Siakam, a two-time All-Star who can't really shoot from long range, but needs the rock in his hands all the same.

"(Haliburton is) not shooting the ball as often as he was before (because of Siakam's presence)," Carlisle said. "When you add a good player to enhance your team and your future, in many cases, the attention many times — wrongly — goes on Tyrese."

Haliburton's touches may have dipped a bit, but he still remains the team's lead playmaker. Other folks seem to have their own opinions about how he can deal with possible lingering effects of the injury, with just nine games left in the team's regular season.

"Some people have been calling me (saying), 'Hey, maybe you should sit a game.' I'm like, 'What is (that) going to do? You know what I mean? I don't want to do that. I want to compete, and I want to play as much as I can, so I don't really care for anything like that. Go, go, go is just the world that I live in now, and I'm ready for that."

The Pacers are currently 41-33, the sixth seed in the Eastern Conference standings. The team is just two games behind the fifth-seeded Orlando Magic (42-30) and could conceivably supplant them. Conversely, Indiana is just one game ahead of the reigning Eastern Conference champion Miami Heat, who at 39-33 are currently the seventh seed in the East.