The Indiana guard caught up with Yahoo Sports senior NBA reporter Vincent Goodwill in the offseason at USA Basketball training camp to discuss the Pacers’ role as spoilers last season and whether they can carry it into this season.
Now, the last time we also saw you at the Eastern Conference looked a lot different.
Now you got Paul George with Philly.
New York has loaded up a little bit first off.
Do you embrace being like the heel?
Nobody likes being like the crowd heel anymore, the sort of wrestling villain.
Do you enjoy that or is that just the label that we’ve put on you?
I think it’s a label that’s been put on me.
I just like, I like playing basketball and I’m, I’m, I understand that people don’t want to see Indiana win anything they don’t want to see us do.
Well, um, you know, it’s a small market team.
It’s for the majority of my life, Indiana has been looked at as, you know, boring or whatever the case may be.
Um So I just go in the game, just understand and that it’s whoever’s in our locker room, whoever’s in our travel party against the world, basically, you know.
And so, um I think that that’s been kind of added on to me because of the competition, the Milwaukee Series, the competition in the New York Series.
Uh it’s kind of been added on to me.
But I mean, whatever the media puts on me is what, what’s put on me, I think at the end of the day, I just wanna be known as a guy who gives us all and competes at 100% and, um, just trying to keep doing that.
But you kinda, it, it gives you guys an identity if you do lean into it, if there’s one thing that great teams all have, they have this identity and if you’re the giant killer, that’s something you walk into any building and everybody knows what’s happening when Tyrese Halliburton and the Indiana Pacers are walking into your, into your house.
No question.
I mean, teams don’t want to take us lightly.
They know what we bring to the table offensively.
They know um how we can get going on any night.
So I think at the end of the day, regardless of what is the perception of, of us is, I think our peers know that they need to be ready when they play us.
And um I think that’s, you know, that matters more than anything that teams respect us and to know that they gotta be ready to play.
And um we know now that we have this success, every other team in our conference, every team in the league wants to have that success as well.
And so, you know, when, when teams play us, they’re gonna be ready to go.
It’s no, no surprising or anything.
So that’s the great part about it is not, not to say that we are now the, we went from hunting to being the hunter because we didn’t win.
But I think that when you have success teams look at you like we wanna have success similar to that.
So they’re gonna go at you.
And I, I think that’s the great part about it.
