Tyrese Haliburton is the perfect NBA villain, and Knicks fans got a front-row seat to his latest show

One of the prevailing stories of the 2024-25 NBA season was the unofficial search for a new face of the league. LeBron James and Stephen Curry are getting older, and whether it was James or Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, the NBA has always been best contextualized through an unspoken protagonist, and the standard they’ve set has become almost too high for any modern player to reach. 

There’s a drawback with everyone. Is Jayson Tatum entertaining enough? Can the small, cold Minneapolis market broadcast Anthony Edwards widely enough? Victor Wembanyama has yet to appear in the playoffs. Nobody has checked every box. There are almost too many of them. So James has become the first quadragenarian to hold a position we haven’t yet filled. The NBA hasn’t settled on its new hero.

But, and I mean this in the most complimentary way possible, it has found an absolutely perfect villain: Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton. On paper, there is nothing to dislike about him. There are no off-court controversies. He isn’t a dirty player. He is just pure, mustache-twirling fun on a basketball court. He is equal parts genius and showman, as comfortable subtly undermining you with his basketball IQ as he is murdering you with 30-foot stepbacks, and once he’s beaten you, no matter who you are, he’s going to dance on your grave.

We’re talking about a player who busted out the famous “Dame Time” celebration in the future Hall of Famer’s face before he’d even played in a playoff game. None of us should have been surprised when he prematurely copied Reggie Miller’s choke gesture at Madison Square garden on Wednesday. This is the Haliburton experience in a nutshell. He truly cannot wait to twist the knife.

He expressed a bit of regret for doing so after Game 2, but not because he was showing up the Knicks. Rather, he was worried that he “might have wasted it” on a game-tying shot rather than a winner. We live in perhaps the most congenial era in NBA history. Players grow up together on the AAU circuit now. They’re recruited together for college and often cluster at only a handful of schools, maintaining close bonds into their professional careers. That has made rivalries rarer and rarer. It’s sapped a not insignificant chunk of the human drama out of this enterprise.

Maybe that’s what makes Haliburton such a fun opposing force. A great villain is often misunderstood. Think of Draymond Green forging a Hall of Fame career as a second-round pick scoring single-digit points every night and mocking his opponents as he did it. There’s something especially compelling about a player who does things differently, that develops a flare for the dramatic despite humbler origins.

Haliburton was an overlooked three-star recruit. He got traded by his original team when they chose to keep a different point guard over him. Even when he was chosen for Team USA last offseason, one of the greatest honors in all of basketball, he was ridiculed for rarely actually playing. He could be forgiven for developing a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Nobody put him in the spotlight, so he forced his way there.

It wouldn’t be wholly fair to call The Athletic’s annual player poll a villain origin story. Haliburton has been on this path for his entire career. But it exemplifies everything we’re talking about here. In April, a sample of 90 NBA players voted him the most overrated player in basketball. It was patently ridiculous at the time. He’d been playing through a hamstring injury for basically a year. He’d already taken a team to the conference finals, something an active MVP winner in Joel Embiid has never done. He was well on his way to a second All-NBA selection.

But Haliburton’s value is generated in wholly unorthodox ways. He is not, in the traditional sense, a bucket. He is not the standard star guard who scores between 25 and 30 points every night by beating unsuspecting defenders off of the dribble and nailing contested mid-range jumpers. This is not what we think of when we consider the protagonists of NBA history. Being the best player on the floor despite scoring five points is much closer to Draymond than LeBron. That probably contributed to so many players dismissing him. And that’s part of what makes this so fun.

Anybody can make a tough shot. What Haliburton did at the end of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals on Wednesday was more impressive, and certainly more unique, because of what led up to it. I want you to look at where he is on the court with three seconds remaining on the clock.

Almost any other superstar that has the ball in the paint with three seconds left in a game trailing by two points is going to try to force up a layup. Really, what they’re doing is flailing in hopes of drawing a foul. That’s the sort of chaos that end-of-game situations invite. These moments are messy. They are desperate. Players don’t think straight.

What makes Haliburton so special is that he always thinks straight. He never gets rattled. He never loses his confidence in himself. He never makes the wrong decision. How many players would have the wherewithal to see Mitchell Robinson in the paint, understand that there is no way of generating a clean near the basket, and then back out for a possible game-winner on the road rather than a seemingly “safer” game-tying shot all in under three seconds? Because Haliburton did, and that’s what made this play so special. While everyone else is panicking, he’s calm, cool and collected, ready to make the biggest shot of the game and remind you afterward how badly needed to choke just to give him that chance.

These are the players who drive you mad when they aren’t wearing your uniform. They’re the ones who do things your favorite players can’t and never forget to remind them of that. And, ultimately, they’re part of what makes #thisleague such an enjoyable world to occupy.

The NBA is a television show. We tacitly admit that every time acknowledge the league’s search for a new main character. But a TV show is much more than its lead. It has to be a well-rounded ecosystem full of compelling characters. And that’s what Haliburton has become: a perpetual underdog who rubs his triumphs in the faces of his more ballyhooed peers. Giannis Antetokounmpo is arguably a face of the league candidate. Donovan Mitchell plays like a more traditional superstar. Madison Square Garden is the stage on which those stars are so often crowned. And, round-by-round, Haliburton just keeps ripping their hearts out and stomping them to pieces.

And maybe that’s what the league really needs moving forward. We can’t rely on another player coming along that’s as good as James or Jordan, and every time we think we might have found one, we come up with a new reason to dismiss them. The mythology of fandom demands flawless heroes, and that makes flawed villains all the more compelling. Haliburton doesn’t play like his competitors. He doesn’t act like them either. But he beats them all the same, laughing as he does it, and in the process, he just keeps becoming a more and more memorable character in the soap opera that is professional basketball.