Is Tyrese Haliburton the most overrated player in NBA?

Is Tyrese Haliburton the most overrated player in NBA?

We are nearly two weeks removed from the 2024-25 NBA regular season concluding. The Athletic published their annual anonymous player poll on Tuesday, asking 158 total players around the league about a myriad of topics, including best and worst organizations, who they think will win the title and others.

One of the questions happens to be who players think is the most overrated and underrated player. Last year, Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert earned the nod for the most overrated, earning 13.6 percent of the 81 votes tallied (11 votes). This year, however, featured a new name: Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton.

I’ll be honest: This surprised me, and I don’t necessarily see how this is the case. But let’s talk about it.

Only 90 of the 158 players voted for this award, with Haliburton earning 14.4 percent of the vote (13 votes). Haliburton averaged 18.6 points and 9.2 assists per game this season, shooting 47.3 percent from the floor and 38.8 percent from 3-point range on 7.7 3-point attempts per game.

Perhaps players think fans and those around the league think highly of Haliburton, who led Indiana to their first Eastern Conference Finals appearance in over a decade, than they do? Did it have to do with him making the Olympic team?

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I know there’s the internet narrative that Haliburton is a “frontrunner,” but in no way does that make him overrated as a player. Who knows, maybe they dislike him because of that. I can’t answer that, but all I can say is that when you think of the league’s best young guards, I still don’t know if his name is mentioned that much at the top relative to his peers. Maybe I’m wrong. I have been before and will be again.

The results are there of Tyrese Haliburton leading a top-flight offense far in the postseason. The results of him playing an efficient brand of basketball in a hyper-fast offense, which only so few can do, are there. The results of him making advanced reads that few guards are capable of making consistently are there.

This one is weird to me, but perhaps I am also wrong in my evaluation of Haliburton’s game relative to the rest of his peers.

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