Tyrese Haliburton on the league’s new 65 game threshold for end of season awards. Full YouTube segment link below. Full episode out tomorrow.
Tyrese Haliburton confirmed that he came back sooner from his injury due to the NBA's new 65-game threshold
NBAThursday, 15 February 2024 at 01:00
Indiana Pacers' All-Star, Tyrese Haliburton, confirmed in an interview what everyone suspected, stating that he rushed his recovery as much as he could in order to not miss any more games and be elegible for the end of the season awards.
In a recent episode of JJ Reddick's "The Old Man and the Three", Tyrese Haliburton shared what was going through is mind while he was recovering from a hamstring injury that kept him aside for a few games.
When JJ Reddick asked him if his return against Portland Trail Blazers was in some way incentivated by this "new 65-game" rule, Tyrese answered:
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"No question, Yeah, what?" Haliburton said. "I thought I was ready to go for the Portland game. So did our medical staff. Everybody agreed. But if this was never the case, I might have been like, 'Give it another game or two. Maybe think more through this. Let's try to be 100%.'"
"I've just been frustrated by it completely," Haliburton said when asked about the new rule. "I understand where the league is coming from. At the end of the day, I'm a fan of basketball like everybody is. We want the best players to play. But realistically, like we talked about earlier, there's only a couple of us this could hurt financially. ... The intent is correct. I think people misconstrued my words to say, act like I don't care about fans or I don't want to play. I want to play 82 games if I can. That's just not how the cookie crumbles right now."
This controversial rule has had a lot of detractors. The thing is that it affects directly the amount of money that a basketball player could earn when it comes to sign contract extensions. The NBA allows teams to pay more money if the players reach certain milestones, such as being part of the All-NBA teams or other important individual accolades.
While the intention of the rule is for the better of the entertainment, because all of us want to see the best players going against each other, it creates an uncomfortable situation where players might feel pressured to rush their recovery from minor injuries and therefore, maybe they'll end up aggravating their conditions, missing several games or entire seasons, causing long-term harm to their careers.
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