The first chip was placed at age 14.
Haliburton was a high school freshman in Oshkosh, Wis., when he learned from his parents that the Playground Warriors, an AAU team he’d played on since middle school alongside Tyler Herro, the future Miami Heat guard, no longer felt he had a future with the program.
“They never said that I was cut, but my parents told me that it was essentially like, ‘He can come if he wants to,’” he says. “So, like—that, I think, was worse.”
The decision—and the fact that he learned about it from his parents, not from the club—still rankles him years later, so much so that the episode remains “probably the main motivation,” he says, for all that came after. “Because I don’t ever want to get back to a place like that.”
He showed up for his first practice with Milwaukee-based Wisconsin United, a three-hour round-trip drive from home in Oshkosh, “pissed at the world,” with faded self-belief and a jump shot that began well below his waist, a remnant of a childhood where he lacked the strength to use textbook form. United’s coach, Bryan Johnikin, tried tinkering with his new guard’s unique shot angle by using his 3-year-old grandson as a defender. Johnikin asked the boy to hold out his hand while Haliburton shot. Haliburton’s release was so low that the preschooler blocked it.
“I left in tears because I was so embarrassed of what was going on,” Haliburton says.
Johnikin called his assistant, worried that he’d chased away a kid he’d meant to inspire.
“‘Shit, I might have lost our best player,’” Johnikin remembers saying. “Most kids would duck out. Most kids don’t want to have us pull out their weaknesses.”
Haliburton kept coming back.
As he and Johnikin rebuilt his self-belief and jump shot, Haliburton won a state championship, earned Gatorade’s state player of the year honors, and dropped 42 points as a senior to beat a team led by a future Wisconsin Mr. Basketball winner. While at a high-school graduation party for Tyler Herro, his old AAU teammate, Haliburton says his former Playground Warriors coach pulled him aside and “apologized for everything.” (That coach? Chris Herro, Tyler’s dad. “I love Chris Herro, I love the Herro family, and I mean honestly, I should be thanking him,” Haliburton says. “It’s one of the greatest, like, best moments of my life, you know?”)
Haliburton kept collecting slights. He remembered being off most recruiters’ radars. He still has bookmarked tweets critical of him at Iowa State, even when NBA draftniks began projecting him as a lottery pick. When Sacramento traded him to Indiana in 2022, the feeling of not being valued by a club he thought would be his long-term home stung for months. Haliburton says he likes to prove himself right more than prove others wrong—but this is also the same player who admits, “I’m at my best when people are talking shit to me.”
Knicks fans were the latest to learn that. “There’s nothing like the Garden,” he says. And throughout New York and Indiana’s Eastern Conference semifinal in May, Haliburton felt one pocket of seats across from the Pacers’ bench was consistently on him the most. As he tells it, a pregame interaction set the tone for their series-clinching win:
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