The Oklahoma City Thunder won the 2025 NBA championship on Sunday, capping one of the most dominant seasons in NBA history with 84 total wins. It’s a remarkable achievement, and yet it’s always going to have an asterisk next to it after Tyrese Haliburton went down in the first quarter with what his father told ESPN was an Achilles injury.
There’s been no official word yet so we will wait to put a stamp on it, but everyone knows. Haliburton knew the minute he hit the floor and started pounding the court in tears. It’s a torn Achilles.
“All of our hearts dropped,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said of the moment Haliburton went down.
Indiana hung around admirably without its pilot, but the OKC defense was just too much and once the 3s started going in, the Pacers just couldn’t create enough offense to overcome Haliburton’s monumental absence.
To call this a gut punch would be an understatement. Haliburton came out gunning, connecting on three 3-pointers in the first five minutes. The Pacers were here to play. This had all the makings of a classic Game 7. Watching Haliburton be helped back to the locker room on one leg with a towel over his head sucked every ounce of air out of the basketball universe.
You feel terrible for Haliburton and the Pacers. Injuries always suck, but blowing an Achilles mere minutes into Game 7 of the Finals is another level. There’s another layer to this story, though, that everyone is going to be talking about: Should Haliburton have even been playing in the first place?
This question is relevant because Haliburton strained his calf in Game 5 of this series. He continued to play in that game but was completely ineffective, and it was a real question whether he would be able to go in Game 6. But the Pacers put him through all the appropriate mobility tests and obviously everyone involved was satisfied with the results, so not only did he play, but he played great.
Once he passed that real-life test, there was absolutely no doubt he was going to play in Game 7, and anyone second-guessing that decision has never been anywhere near an athletic moment like a championship game. You would’ve had to chain Haliburton to a steel post to keep him from playing, and even then you better triple-check those chains.
Still, it’s fair to question whether the calf strain put him at increased risk of an Achilles tear. Current NBA star Donovan Mitchell noted this on social media, as did former All-NBA player Isaiah Thomas.
The most infamous example of one injury potentially leading to the other was when Kevin Durant, then a member of the Golden State Warriors, tore his Achilles in Game 5 of the 2019 Finals after having sat out the previous five weeks with a calf strain. It would be easy make a correlation, as many are doing and have done ever since Durant went down, and it might not be wrong. But the research doesn’t support that correlation, at least not directly.
“It’s true, the literature doesn’t support a direct link between a calf injury and an Achilles tear,” one orthopedic surgeon who preferred to remain anonymous told CBS Sports on Sunday night. “But there’s a common sense aspect to this, and for all injuries, in the sense that it’s along the same structure (the calf muscle and Achilles tendon), and any time one thing is weakened, the whole support system surrounding it kind of has to pick up more slack. … If you’re playing on an injured knee, you might be more apt to sprain your ankle. Compensation down the chain has to be considered.”
Dr. Alan Beyer, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine physician at the Hoag Orthopedic Institute, agrees that “the literature doesn’t support” a direct connection between calf strains leading to Achilles tears, or even putting you necessarily at an increased risk.
However, “a bad calf strain can extend down to the Achilles musculotendinous junction, and thereby make an Achilles tear more likely,” Dr. Beyer added.
This is potentially important. The musculotendinous junction is the anatomical region where muscle tissue transitions into tendon tissue, which is to say where the calf muscle becomes the Achilles tendon. If a particular calf injury has occurred in the lower part of the muscle, it could be a situation where, according to longtime physical therapist and CBS Sports injury analyst Marty Jaramillo, there was also a partial or micro tearing of the Achilles tendon that was missed on imaging more focused on the calf.
Put another way: Was Haliburton’s original injury more than just a calf strain? Did he actually have a partial or micro tear to his Achilles, and that’s what eventually snapped? Could it have been the same for Durant and/or NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, whose Achilles tear was also preceded by a calf injury earlier that year?
“A great apples-to-apples comparison is when Haliburton first suffered his calf tear (in Game 5) and when Durant first tore his calf (in 2019),” Jaramillo said. “If you go back and look at both of those replays, the mechanism of injury that we talk about, that moment just before the injury happens, it was more appropriate for an Achilles than a calf strain. The medical staff treated it as a calf muscle, but again, it’s a possibility that the imaging missed a micro tear. It was a calf injury, but it also could’ve been a very slight or partial Achilles tear.”
For what it’s worth, Dr. David J. Chao put a video out after Haliburton’s original calf injury noting the tape job on his right Achilles, suggesting tendonitis, which can be, in some cases, a softer euphemism for what are basically micro tears.
Is it possible that Haliburton was dealing with a micro Achilles tear all along? And that tear was made a bit worse when the calf strain occurred? And eventually it all snapped? Yes, it’s possible. And perhaps this will be the latest in an increasingly long line of cautionary torn Achilles tales that will expand the depth of diagnosis and return-to-play guidelines moving forward.
Either way, it’s important to note that nobody is questioning the Pacers’ original diagnosis of a calf strain, and if it was also a tiny Achilles tear, which, again, nobody knows, missing that on imaging is something that can happen. And on top of that, this wasn’t your typical return-to-play situation.
If this was the regular season or even a non-elimination playoff game, Haliburton probably would have sat out more than a few games. But this was the NBA Finals. This might have been the only shot he’ll ever have at winning a championship.
And again, once he looked fine in Game 6, playing in Game 7 was a no-brainer. I bet even if you told Haliburton there was a 90% chance he would tear his Achilles in this game, he would’ve played on the 10%. You don’t get many chances like this in life. This was just a freak play at the absolute worst time.
Actually, perhaps it’s a stretch to call it a freak play. Unfortunately, these Achilles tears, which used to be a true anomaly injury, have become all too common. Hell, this is the third Pacers player this season alone to suffer an Achilles tear (James Wiseman and Isaiah Jackson were the others). Jayson Tatum and Damian Lillard both tore their Achilles this postseason as well. All told, there have been more Achilles tears this season than any other season in NBA history.
Something’s up here, and it certainly bears looking into by the NBA.
In the end, however, this is all hot debate for the offseason. For right now, again, there was simply no way Haliburton was going to sit out Game 7. As Carlisle said after the game, he “authored one of the great playoff runs in NBA history,” and not being out there to see it through was not an option.
This was, and always will be, an unbelievable Pacers story. Nobody gave them any chance to get this far. They were 80-to-1 to win the title before the playoffs began, and they were right there to pull it off. It’s just a devastating part of sports. Scott Norwood’s missed field goal. Bill Buckner’s error. Haliburton’s injury. Who knows why, but sometimes the best stories have to end in heartbreak.
