There’s a special kind of chaos in the NBA. One minute you’re the league’s breakout darling, and the next? You’re running on fumes while fans on Reddit start wondering if you swapped bodies with Ricky Rubio. Tyrese Haliburton knows that chaos intimately. And now, we finally know why his start to the season felt more like a warm-up lap in Shaq’s rec league than an All-NBA campaign.

Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle just pulled the curtain back on what really happened with Haliburton’s sluggish opening. And spoiler alert: it’s got a lot to do with two guys named LeBron and Steph.

See, after last year’s Eastern Conference Finals run, Haliburton’s offseason was already going to be short. Then came the Olympic commitments. He basically went from hobbling out of Game 7 to trying to keep up with LeBron’s pregame Tomahawk dunks and Curry’s trick-shot shootarounds for Team USA. According to Carlisle, Haliburton “wasn’t really healthy until about two or three days before training camp.”

Translation? The man was running on vibes, caffeine, and ice packs.

Carlisle broke it down like a seasoned vet who’s seen too many hamstrings betray their owners: “You don’t just come into training camp to get in shape. Nowadays in this NBA, you’ve got to do your conditioning stuff during the summer.”

Which, of course, Haliburton missed because he was mostly trying not to fall apart while playing behind two of the most ball-dominant legends the sport’s ever seen. Rather than recuperating and preparing for the upcoming NBA season, he was busy being coached by the two modern faces of the NBA. Of course, it seems to have eventually paid off too.

Trust the Process… Or at Least the Coach

But let’s not act like this season turned into a Pacers pity party. After a rocky 10–15 start, Haliburton kicked it into high gear like a turbo boost in NBA Street Vol. 2. The result? A post-All-Star break run that went 20–9 and ended in their first NBA Finals appearance since the year 2000.

The real story behind this turnaround, though, is the relationship between Haliburton and Carlisle. It’s not often that a new-era point guard and a coach whose offense once ran slower than Kendrick Perkins in transition find perfect harmony—but here we are. “Tyrese made it very clear what type of team we were going to be,” Carlisle said. “The guy plays with joy. He’s a special young player to build around.”

Carlisle has gone from calling iso plays for Dirk in Dallas to letting Tyrese run a free-flowing offense with more movement than a Harlem Globetrotters warm-up. Even Doc Rivers chimed in during the playoffs saying, “I don’t remember his teams being that free-flowing in the past.”

What makes this dynamic even sweeter is how Carlisle himself has evolved. Longtime Pacers writer Mark Montieth even admitted Carlisle used to coach like a spreadsheet: rigid, calculated, paint-by-numbers. Now? The man’s cracking jokes on the Pat McAfee Show about not even needing to call plays in loud arenas.

That’s what trust looks like. Pacers GM Chad Buchanan summed it up best: “When you have the foundation of a phenomenal Head Coach and phenomenal lead guard… you have two of the most important things to build a championship-level team. They’re aligned.”

Hamstring be damned, Tyrese Haliburton ended the season with another All-NBA Third Team nod, a playoff run that stunned half the league, and a bromance with Carlisle that makes Phil and MJ look like coworkers. He’s the engine, the soul, the “joy” behind this new Pacers era—and now we know how much that joy had to push through.

LeBron and Curry may have taken the spotlight in the summer, but when it mattered most? Tyrese took Indiana back to the promised land.