OKLAHOMA CITY — Every answer to what has become the most-asked question in the NBA — how exactly the Indiana Pacers continue to pull off one improbable postseason comeback after another — must include the gutsy shotmaking of Tyrese Haliburton.
His game-winning shot with 0.3 seconds remaining in Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday was the fifth time Haliburton made a shot to either take the lead or tie in the final five seconds, the most of any player in a single postseason in 27 years.
Just as notable, but omitted from the highlights, was what happened 10.8 seconds earlier.
Trailing by 1 point, Indiana had grabbed a defensive rebound and was pushing the ball up the court for its final possession. It would have been a logical time for coach Rick Carlisle to call the team’s final timeout and remind players of their instructions inside a decibel-pounding atmosphere he described as “madness.”
Yet Carlisle did not call a timeout. He did not bark from the sideline. He never took his hands off his hips as Haliburton zoomed past before rising up for his jump shot, because Carlisle had already laid out the plan one possession earlier, during a break in play as officials reviewed an out-of-bounds play that eventually gave the ball to Oklahoma City with 22 seconds to play.
“If we get a stop and get the rebound,” he told the Pacers, “we’re going to go.”
That decision to let his players dictate the final moments, and the game-winning sequence that followed, has helped Indiana grab early control of the championship series. And it can be traced to more than a decade earlier, when the Pacers’ coach first learned how to relinquish control of his team’s offense.
That evolution in coaching style led to a championship in Dallas in 2011 and has now brought Indiana three victories from its first NBA championship.
“If the narrative was ‘He’s controlling,’ it couldn’t be more untrue,” Pacers backup point guard T.J. McConnell said. “Me and Ty, what we see out there, he lets us go. The empowerment that he shows us as players has been incredible, and it’s a big reason I think for a lot of our success.”
When Carlisle first became a head coach in 2001, in Detroit, he was a study in contrasts: forward-looking and flexible enough to stay a step ahead by changing what his team ran based on his personnel, yet rigid in wanting ownership of the offense. He was a “call every play from the sideline kind of coach,” said a former Pistons staffer who did not want to be identified in order to preserve relationships within the NBA.
The approach followed Carlisle to a first head-coaching stint in Indiana and then in 2008 to Dallas. Carlisle would call for a play dubbed “four-up” to get star Dirk Nowitzki the ball, a former Dallas staff member said, “and you would run the play.”
But the Mavericks’ roster featured point guard Jason Kidd, a Hall of Famer who needed no such hand-holding. The season’s turning point came midway through when “what I learned … was to give J-Kidd the ball and get out of the way,” Carlisle said Thursday. “Let him run the show. Let him run the team.”
The change eventually helped Dallas upset Miami during the 2011 Finals. Kidd and fellow Mavericks guard J.J. Barea, given the reins by Carlisle to direct the offense and find Nowitzki, rallied after trailing in the fourth quarter by 15 points in Game 2 to win the game and turn the series.
The long-tail effects of Carlisle’s adaptation are still being felt 14 years later in Indianapolis, where his development of, and confidence in, Haliburton has allowed the Pacers’ offense to thrive in pressure-packed moments. Of the three all-time teams to win a Finals game after trailing by at least 15 points in the fourth quarter, two of them have now been coached by Carlisle. And both comebacks followed scripts that were largely written by the players themselves.
In the modern NBA, and especially the Finals, where defenses have multiple days to prepare, calling plays from the sideline routinely “doesn’t work, it’s easy to scout,” Pacers center Myles Turner said. “But when you have random movement on offense, guys that are someone like Tyrese who wants to pass the ball, it makes the game a little bit easier.”
Carlisle called his collaboration with Haliburton “very similar” to developing trust in Kidd more than a decade earlier, and also entrusting Luka Doncic with the offense in Dallas from 2018-21.
“It’s pretty clear when you have a player of that kind of magnitude, that kind of presence, that kind of knowledge and vision and depth, you got to let them do what they do,” Carlisle said.
“They’re going to have some ups and downs. They’re going to make some mistakes. If they’re doing it consistent with how they’re seeing the game, the lessons learned will be more impactful.”
The wide latitude Carlisle now affords his point guards doesn’t come automatically. In 2015 while in Dallas, he butted heads with Rajon Rondo over the direction of the offense, and Rondo was soon gone. (Years later, Rondo said he was told by Mavericks management that Carlisle no longer wanted to coach him.) In 2018, Dallas acquired wunderkind guard Luka Doncic, who during a preseason game threw an intercepted behind-the-back pass with a nonchalance that displeased Carlisle, the former Mavericks staffer said. On the next play down the floor, the person added, Doncic did it again.
“I think Rick probably found out shortly after that he’s not going to win that power struggle,” the former Dallas staffer said. “But also empowering players to be who they are can be beneficial to everybody.”
Even in 2021, during Carlisle’s first season coaching Indiana, “we had a game … where he stopped us and called a play every single possession,” Turner said. When center Tony Bradley first joined Indiana on a 10-day contract in early March, he arrived having heard “mixed reviews” from players around the league about playing for Carlisle, Bradley said with a smile. (They did not align with reality, Bradley added, saying Carlisle “is very open and lets us make the reads.”)
Those reviews may be because Carlisle’s standards remain as high as ever. But the coach’s accountability comes with an incentive.
With more trust comes more freedom.
“He won’t let any of the teammates settle regardless of who you are from top to bottom, and that makes a difference,” said Pacers big man James Johnson, who played for the coach in Dallas, as well. “There’s always a lot of coaches that are afraid to get on their top players and they’re afraid to show their different mistakes or they might have different meetings with [superstars]. In Rick’s case, it’s not like that. It’s in front of everybody and it’s ‘get better, and we need you to get better’ mindset.”
“When you get freedom to run the show a little bit you feel a little more entitled and you feel like the obligation to get the job done is more on your shoulders,” Johnson continued. “He lets us handle a lot of our own mistakes within our own locker room. Letting the power or the authority of his position get in the way never happens here. There’s a lot of great coaches I’ve played for, and I feel like Rick is definitely one of the few ones that allow that to happen.”
It didn’t just happen over the last six weeks since the playoffs began, or the last 11 seconds of Game 1. It took place years earlier, a decision that has already won one title and has put Carlisle on the path to potentially win another.
