NEW ORLEANS
Four hundred and eighty-six days. That is how long Tyrese Haliburton waited to play in an NBA game that counted, and on Wednesday night at Smoothie King Center, the wait finally ended. The Indiana Pacers guard returned to the floor for the season opener against the New Orleans Pelicans, his first regular-season action since he tore his right Achilles tendon in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals against Oklahoma City on June 22, 2025, an injury that cost him the whole of last season. At halftime, with this report being written live, New Orleans led Indiana 66-56, according to the ESPN scoreboard. The score, however, was only the second-biggest story in the building.
The biggest was simply that Haliburton was out there at all. His first-half line, per Sportradar, read like a man easing back into his own career rather than forcing it: 7 points and 6 assists in 17 minutes and 42 seconds, on 3-of-8 shooting. The assists mattered more than the points. Indiana's offense last season, in a 19-win campaign played almost entirely without its engine, too often looked like a team waiting for someone to organize it. In the first half on Wednesday, the organizing was back. The ball moved early, it moved with purpose, and it moved through the player the entire franchise is built around.
Haliburton said before the game, in comments carried by Sports Illustrated and Yardbarker, “Just really excited to get back on the floor. It's been a long journey to get here.” A long journey undersells it. An Achilles tear suffered on the sport's biggest stage, in a winner-take-all Finals game, followed by a full season of rehabilitation while his team absorbed loss after loss without him — that is the kind of year that rewrites a career in either direction. Wednesday night was the first public evidence of which direction his is heading, and the early returns were encouraging precisely because they were unspectacular. He pushed pace in transition, he probed and kicked, and he looked, above all, comfortable.
The entrance matched the occasion. According to Bleacher Report, Haliburton arrived at the arena wearing a Triple H jacket and dropped a hype video narrated by Triple H ahead of tip-off, a bit of showmanship that fit a night that was always going to be part basketball game and part homecoming, even on the road. Our NBA desk has tracked his rehabilitation all autumn, and the consistent word out of Indiana was patience: no rushing the timeline, no shortcuts, a return only when the leg and the confidence were both ready. Wednesday, both looked ready.
Indiana actually started the night like the team that had been waiting a year for this. The Pacers led 38-31 after the first quarter, behind 9 first-quarter points from Pascal Siakam, who carried the early offense while Haliburton settled in. Siakam finished the half with 13 points to lead Indiana, Andrew Nembhard added 10, and Ivica Zubac, making his Pacers debut at center, chipped in 8. It is a new-look starting five for Indiana — Haliburton, Nembhard, Kelly Oubre Jr., Siakam and Zubac — and for one quarter it looked like a group that had played together for months rather than minutes.
Then the second quarter flipped the game. New Orleans opened the period on a 10-0 run, erased the deficit, and kept building, outscoring Indiana badly enough to take a 66-56 lead into the locker room. That swing is the live tension of this game as the second half begins: the Pacers, who visited the Pelicans as 3.5-point pregame favorites according to DraftKings odds carried by Sports Illustrated, now have to chase a game they controlled for the first 12 minutes, on the road, in their returning star's first night back.
Indiana is also doing this short-handed. Kelly Oubre Jr. started in place of Aaron Nesmith, who is out with a hamstring injury, and veteran guard T.J. McConnell is also sidelined with a hamstring problem, thinning the second unit at exactly the position where Indiana's depth was supposed to be a strength. That context makes Haliburton's 17:42 first-half workload worth watching in the second half: the Pacers need his minutes, but the whole point of the last 486 days was not to win one October night. How Indiana manages his second-half load may say as much about this season as anything that happens on the scoreboard. The Pacers know the marathon here better than anyone.
On the other side, New Orleans has every reason to treat its home opener as a statement game of its own. The Pelicans started Zion Williamson, Trey Murphy III, Dejounte Murray and Yves Missi, a core the franchise has assembled to climb back into the Western Conference playoff picture, and the second-quarter surge showed what that group can do when the pace tilts its way. There is a subplot in a Pelicans uniform, too: Bennedict Mathurin, the former Pacer, signed with New Orleans in the offseason, and facing the team that drafted him — on the night of Haliburton's return, no less — gives the second half an extra edge.
What happens from here is genuinely uncertain, which is what makes this the game of the night on the sports front. Indiana's first quarter proved the ceiling is real. New Orleans's second quarter proved the floor of this Pacers team, with a rusty star and two rotation players out, is still a work in progress. Haliburton's return is already a success on the only terms that were fully in his control: he is healthy, he is playing, and he is creating. Whether it becomes a win is a question the second half at Smoothie King Center will answer. This report will be updated when the game goes final.
