Tyrese Haliburton Plays Again in the Gym Where He Grew Up

Tyrese Haliburton played his first game since tearing his Achilles in the 2025 Finals, and he chose Iowa State’s Hilton Coliseum, where students got in free.

Tyrese Haliburton came out for pregame introductions at Hilton Coliseum on Wednesday night in a No. 22 Pacers jersey, the number he wore at Iowa State, and took a microphone in front of a crowd that had been lining up around the building for hours. He thanked the Indiana Pacers and the Minnesota Timberwolves for making the night happen, led the arena through a Cyclones chant, and told the fans, “Iowa State is so special to me,” before changing back into his usual No. 0. The date was October 7, 2026. The last time Haliburton had played in a game was Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, 472 days earlier.

Signal. What happened: Haliburton returned to game action for the first time in 472 days, finishing with seven points and six assists in 16 minutes as Indiana beat Minnesota 123-112 in its preseason opener. Exact object: an NBA preseason game played at the home arena of his alma mater, which had not hosted an NBA exhibition since 2018. When and where: Wednesday, October 7, 2026, with a 6 p.m. tip at Hilton Coliseum in Ames, Iowa. Source: the Pacers’ official game preview and the announcement from Iowa State Athletics, along with same-night game reports. Why it matters: Haliburton missed all of the 2025-26 season after tearing his right Achilles, and Indiana went 19-63 without him, so the night was the first live look at the point guard who led the Pacers to the 2025 Finals.

The first stretch lasted about eight minutes, and Haliburton scored the Pacers’ first points of the night to a roaring crowd. He left the floor sweating harder than he expected and said afterward that he was tired, but that he kept coming back to one thought: “I just kept feeling like, man, I’m playing again.” Minnesota had Anthony Edwards, LaMelo Ball and Rudy Gobert on the floor in the first half. In the second quarter Haliburton whipped a transition pass to Aaron Nesmith for a corner three, then found Nesmith in the opposite corner a few possessions later. He used an Ivica Zubac screen to get an open look from deep and muscled through Jonathan Kuminga and Gobert for a layup. The night also included one steal and two blocks.

His night was finished after 16 first-half minutes, and he came out for the second half in slides. When the student section chanted for him to play late in the game, he smiled and pointed down at his footwear, and the chant changed into a call for him to put his shoes on. From the bench he joined in the Iowa State rituals, including the Juicy Wiggle and the singalong to “Mr. Brightside,” and after the game he posted a thank-you to Iowa State on social media. In his postgame comments he called the night fun and said “perspective is everything,” that simply being back on the floor was what mattered. He described the road back as a rollercoaster of emotions with plenty of hard days, and said he had never gone that long without playing basketball.

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The game exists because Haliburton asked for it. He has said he pitched the idea a couple of years ago and then spent time looking for a team willing to make the trip to Ames. Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan, a Des Moines native, made the Indiana side an easy sell, and Minnesota agreed to be the opponent. Micah Byars, Iowa State’s director of basketball operations, was part of the group that put it together. Iowa State announced the game on August 12, with tickets going on sale September 9.

Haliburton credits Ames with helping him grow up. Learning who he was without his parents nearby, he has said, is a big part of why the place matters to him, and he returns as often as he can. Weeks before the game he surprised his close friend Georges Niang in Ames at Niang’s induction into the Iowa State hall of fame. Ames has no professional franchise, and in his telling the school’s athletes fill that role, which is part of the pride he says they take in the place.

That announcement described the game as the fourth NBA exhibition played at Hilton Coliseum and the first since 2018, with earlier ones in 1991 and 1999. The arena opened on December 2, 1971, and carries the name of James H. Hilton, who served as Iowa State’s president from 1953 to 1965 and pushed for its construction. It seats 14,267. The building was engineered to keep crowd noise inside, and fans sit close to the floor. Its nickname, “Hilton Magic,” is a phrase sportswriters have used for the Cyclones’ habit of winning unlikely home games, including a 1989 upset of No. 3 Missouri.

Haliburton’s history in the building runs well past games. Iowa State raised a banner for his Olympic gold medal at Hilton on March 1, 2025, after he became the first former Cyclones basketball player to win Olympic gold at the Paris Games. That July, about a month after he tore his Achilles, he proposed to Jade Jones, a former Iowa State cheerleader he met on campus, at center court.

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Haliburton bought out the student section. Iowa State first ran a lottery for free student tickets, which was immediately oversubscribed, and Byars said Haliburton then covered both ends of the student section, buying all of the requested tickets. About 2,500 students attended free. Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said Haliburton did not know how many tickets he had purchased and guessed the number was in the thousands. Students received Haliburton shirts, free pizza was waiting at the gates, and the line had wrapped around the building by the time the doors opened.

Before the game Haliburton said nobody is as passionate about Iowa State as its current students, and he joked that the building would hold a few Timberwolves fans as well. The Iowa State players and coaching staff were expected in attendance, and Carlisle praised the students’ showing afterward.

The crowd also found a target on Indiana’s own bench. Rookie guard Braden Smith, the former Purdue star the Pacers acquired the day after the 2026 draft, was booed each time he touched the ball. Carlisle said he had no idea why, pointing out that Iowa State beat Purdue by 30 points last season, a game he attended. A social media post shown to him during a timeout offered one theory: that Smith had potentially taken the roster spot of Iowa State guard Tamin Lipsey. Haliburton said he was still baffled, and Smith took it as a compliment. “I kinda love it,” Smith said, adding that he has always enjoyed road crowds.

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Haliburton arrived at Iowa State in the summer of 2018 from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a three-star recruit who weighed less than 150 pounds on a 6-foot-4 frame. Assistant coach Neill Berry had first noticed him at a grassroots tournament in Atlanta in 2016, and head coach Steve Prohm eventually made the trip to see him play. As a freshman he set a school record with a 17-assist game and ranked second nationally in assist-to-turnover ratio. The summer before his sophomore year he won gold with the United States at the 2019 under-19 World Cup and was named to the tournament’s all-star five. As a sophomore he was asked to score more, and through 22 games in 2019-20 he averaged 15.2 points, 6.5 assists, 5.9 rebounds and 2.5 steals, leading the Big 12 in assists and steals. Prohm has said Haliburton did not play a single possession at point guard that season, and his 3.00 career assist-to-turnover ratio remains the second best in school history.

It ended inside Hilton Coliseum. On February 8, 2020, near the end of the first half against Kansas State, Haliburton landed awkwardly on his left wrist while trying to block a shot, a wrist he had already hurt earlier that season. He played a few minutes of the second half before leaving for good, and an MRI confirmed a fracture. He declared for the NBA draft on March 24, 2020, after two seasons that produced 574 points, 267 assists, 249 rebounds and 108 steals, and without the senior-night speech he had watched teammates give. Asked about returning to the floor where his college career stopped, he called it “kind of poetic.”

The Sacramento Kings took him No. 12 in the 2020 draft after he had been projected as a top-10 pick in most mock drafts. He finished third in Rookie of the Year voting in 2021, then was traded to Indiana on February 8, 2022, in a deal built around Domantas Sabonis. In Indiana he made his first All-Star team in 2022-23, signed a five-year maximum extension worth up to $260 million in 2023, led the league with 10.9 assists per game in 2023-24, and earned All-NBA Third Team honors in 2024 and 2025. In between came the Olympic gold medal from Paris.

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The injury came on June 22, 2025, at Paycom Center in Oklahoma City. With 4:55 left in the first quarter of Game 7 and the score tied at 16, Haliburton, who had been playing through a strained right calf, went down on his next step. The Pacers announced a right lower leg injury, his father said it was an Achilles, and the Oklahoma City Thunder went on to win 103-91. Haliburton had hit a decisive shot in every series that postseason, including a pull-up jumper in Game 1 of the Finals. He was the third star to tear an Achilles in those playoffs: Damian Lillard tore his in the first round against Indiana, and Jayson Tatum tore his in the second round against New York.

Haliburton has said he cannot open social media without running into something from that game, that it will always be part of him, and that he is trying to move forward from it as best he can.

The recovery covered the whole of 2025-26. Surgery followed the day after Game 7, and the Pacers issued no timeline with it. By late January, about seven months out, Haliburton was playing full-court four-on-four against team interns and reserves. In August he said he had felt capable of playing at nine months but that his body feels dramatically different at fourteen. Indiana, a 50-win team that had reached the Finals a year earlier, finished 19-63, the worst record in franchise history. In February 2026 Haliburton was diagnosed with facial shingles, which he discussed publicly in April as an unexpected obstacle that slowed his rehab.

By late June he told reporters he felt he was “operating like I’m a healthy NBA player” for the first time in a long while. At media day on September 28 he declared himself 100 percent with no restrictions heading into training camp, and Carlisle said the team would watch his workload carefully. Around him is a reshaped rotation that includes center Ivica Zubac, added by trade, alongside Pascal Siakam, Andrew Nembhard, Kelly Oubre Jr., Aaron Nesmith and Obi Toppin.

Zubac’s arrival came with a cost. The Pacers’ 2026 first-round pick belonged to the Los Angeles Clippers once the lottery left Indiana outside the top four, a condition of the trade that brought the center to Indianapolis. Pacers president Kevin Pritchard said the front office felt it needed a center and had the chance to land one who fit. The day after the draft, Indiana traded for Smith, who grew up in Westfield, Indiana.

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Haliburton, now 26, is entering his seventh NBA season and his fifth with Indiana. He described the preseason as something close to an open scrimmage, and said he does not expect to feel the full weight of his comeback until game one of the regular season. The Pacers host the Atlanta Hawks on Saturday in their second preseason game, and the regular season opens October 21 in New Orleans.