It’s not unusual for a player to collect an offensive rebound off a missed free throw and score a bucket. We’ve seen the likes of Russell Westbrook and Giannis Antetokounmpo do it countless times.
That said, it’s not often that a player rebounds his free-throw miss and hits a game-winning three-pointer to ice the game, all in the last 15 seconds. Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton pulled off that exact sequence in his team’s 120-119 Game 2 victory over the Cavaliers.
According to OptaSTATS, Haliburton is the only player in the last 20 years to achieve the feat in a playoff or regular-season game.
In recent years, we’ve seen the offensive-rebounder kick the ball out to a shooter for a buzzer-beating shot. Who could forget Chris Bosh’s pass to Ray Allen in Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals?
Unlike Bosh, the ultra-confident Haliburton had no intention of passing the ball when he collected the offensive board. After Tuesday’s win, he explained why he called the game the second he got the rebound.
“There was no chance I was passing [the ball] down the line. This is what I do, and I just tried to make a big play,” he told TNT Sports.
This is precisely what he does, alright. The Pacers guard’s game winner on Tuesday came less than 10 days after his series-clinching layup against the Bucks in Game 5 of their first-round series. According to The Volume’s Carson Breber, Haliburton is now 10-of-11 on shots to tie or take the lead in the last two minutes this season.
Both of Hali’s game-winners came with less than two seconds left. Only LeBron James pulled off two such clutch shots in the same playoff run when he sank the Raptors and Pacers in back-to-back series in 2018.
Hali has the Pacers in the driver’s seat to upset the 64-win Cavaliers and advance to the Eastern Conference Finals for a second consecutive year. Indiana fell to Boston last year after similarly upsetting Milwaukee and New York in the first two rounds.
