Tyrese Haliburton offered the most encouraging read yet on his Achilles recovery, telling The Pat McAfee Show on Monday that he is “playing with no restrictions” and feels “the best I’ve felt in a long time.” The comments move the Indiana Pacers guard’s timeline from front-office optimism to a first-person account, coming days after the team was reported to be extremely optimistic he would be ready for the season opener.
Haliburton tore his right Achilles in the 2025 NBA Finals and sat out all of last season rehabbing it, roughly 16 months of recovery by the time training camp opens. On Monday he said he is back to full 5-on-5 work with no limitations placed on him, a meaningful marker for a player whose game is built on movement and pace rather than power.
He also addressed a detour in the rehab. Haliburton dealt with a case of shingles during his recovery and lost weight while sick; he said he has since put that weight back on as muscle and is nearly fully past the illness, with only an occasional itchy eye lingering. “This is the best I’ve felt in a long time,” he told Pat McAfee. “I feel great.”
For Indiana, the stakes of that update are straightforward. Haliburton is the engine of a fast, pass-heavy offense, and his availability on opening night shapes how quickly the Pacers can return to the tempo that carried them a year earlier. A healthy Haliburton in camp also lets the coaching staff build its rotation around him from day one rather than holding minutes in reserve for a midseason return.
The Pacers have not committed to a specific game count or minutes plan, and a player feeling good in July is not the same as clearance in October. But the tone Monday was as confident as anything Indiana has offered publicly since the injury, and it came from the player himself.
In fantasy terms, the signal matters. If Haliburton is truly unrestricted by opening night, his redraft value climbs back toward the early rounds on the strength of his assist and three-point production, and his dynasty stock recovers most of the discount the injury created. The one thing to watch through the preseason is whether Indiana quietly manages his minutes early despite his comments; drafters should still budget for the possibility of a cautious ramp before he is a locked-in every-night workhorse.
