Haliburton is Indy’s focal point in All-Star hosting gig

Right now in downtown Indianapolis, Tyrese Haliburton stands nearly 10 stories tall.

This is not a figure of speech, although it would be fitting given the type of season the All-Star guard has had to this point.

On the towering JW Marriott, one of the most recognizable aspects of the Indianapolis skyline, two images of the Indiana Pacers’ mesmerizing point guard are taking up a good chunk of real estate. On the front of the building, Haliburton is throwing a pass—perhaps one of his league-leading 11.8 assists per game. On the side panel, he’s putting up a shot; making those in clutch moments is an underrated aspect of his expanding repertoire.

A giant graphic on the JW isn’t exactly a new development. Whenever a big-time sporting event, like the NBA All-Star Weekend, comes to town, Indianapolis-based Sport Graphics Inc. routinely plasters one on the glass front. It’s been happening for over a decade now. There was a humongous trophy on the south-facing side of the building leading up to the 2022 College Football Playoff title game and a 47,000-square-foot NCAA Tournament bracket on the front the previous spring. This time, though, the chosen graphic is not an inanimate object representing an event of interest strictly inside the United States—it’s a person. Perhaps more important, it’s Haliburton, Indiana’s All-Star and the hometown face of one of the country’s biggest global sporting events of the year.

Those giant images might be the most obvious example of Haliburton’s newfound influence in a place that is the hoops capital of the world this weekend. But they’re not the only ones. Indianapolis’ hometown star is omnipresent.

The 125,000 NBA fans and media arriving by air for All-Star Indy 2024 have been inundated with Haliburton since they touched down. A full regulation basketball court laid over the main concourse of the Indianapolis International Airport sets the mood, and many more billboards of Haliburton in and around the terminals greet folks before they even lay eyes on his giant JW decals.

Indianapolis fans were already crushing on their rising star, who in two short years might already have a higher Q score than any Pacer since Reggie Miller. Earlier this month, there was such demand for Haliburton’s All-Star Game jersey that the Pacers Team Store restocked its No. 0 threads only to see them sell out in under an hour, Scott Agness of The Fieldhouse Files tweeted Feb. 5.

The All-Star Indy 2024 host committee and event organizers have no doubt seen the enthusiastic response and are in prime position to push the face of Indiana’s franchise to the masses. This four-day NBA All-Star event is chock-full of star power, from LeBron to Luka, but Indianapolis gets to boast one of its own as an All-Star headliner—an opportunity most of the recent host cities (Cleveland, Chicago and Charlotte, to name a few) have not been afforded.

“It’s very important for the franchise to be able to say, ‘Hey, Tyrese is our guy!’, but it’s even bigger than just that for the city and state in hosting this event,” said Rick Fuson, Pacers Sports & Entertainment CEO. “From the standpoint of someone who grew up in Indianapolis and who has been with the Pacers organization for 40 years, to have a player of his caliber representing the Pacers in front of a worldwide audience is the kind of pinnacle we’ve only reached a few times in franchise history.”

Word is spreading

Fuson and company have pulled out all the stops in the city’s All-Star effort, with a first-of-its-kind opening ceremony called “The Tip-Off” at the brand-new Bicentennial Unity Plaza that took place Thursday; the multi-day NBA Crossover, a fan event and interactive experience across 350,000 square feet of space at the Indiana Convention Center; and many other offerings. It’s being billed as the “most innovative and fan-friendly” NBA All-Star Weekend in history, and no one represents those two pillars better than Tyrese Haliburton.

Innovative? Over the course of three games earlier this season, Haliburton became the first player to record 40 or more assists over a three-game stretch without a single turnover. Just a few weeks later, he became the first in several decades to turn in back-to-back 20/20 performances—20 or more points and 20 or more assists—joining an exclusive list with legendary distributors John Stockton and Magic Johnson. The fan-friendly part is a breeze, too. Haliburton’s easygoing personality and Midwestern roots (he grew up in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin) instantly endeared him to Pacers fans, but his pinpoint passing and knack for making big shots in critical moments have made him a must-watch for fans around the country.

And those fans have spoken.

Haliburton led all Eastern Conference guards in the fan, media and player All-Star voting, tabulating over a million more votes than eight-time All-Star and future Hall of Famer Damian Lillard, who came in a distant second. Those votes didn’t all come from the 317, 765 or 812 area codes, either. The word is spreading about the new face of the Pacers franchise, a fact that isn’t lost on Haliburton himself.

“The best part about where I’m at right now is seeing my jersey on the road in random places,” Haliburton told reporters last month, when he was off to an insurmountable lead in the NBA All-Star Game voting. “That means the world to me.”

The world stage

Now, the world, not just the 31 other NBA locations scattered across the country, will get to experience Haliburton, his city and his state in this seminal moment. While interest in the All-Star Game has dipped domestically over the past several years, there’s still an insatiable thirst for the league internationally. That’s especially true in Asia, where countries like the Philippines and China can’t get enough NBA basketball. One in four Chinese adults consider themselves “avid” NBA fans, according to a recent study, and NBA League Pass interest has spiked considerably in Portugal, Turkey, Italy and Mexico, among others.

That’s a far cry from the last time Indianapolis was the NBA All-Star host, in 1985, when the game’s popularity was much more contained inside America’s borders. That was before the young Michael Jordan reached global icon status, before the importation of incredible European basketball talent became commonplace, and before former Commissioner David Stern struck a deal to get NBA games played on Chinese State Television—a covenant that has produced hundreds of millions of basketball fans in the planet’s second-most-populous nation.

Fuson remembers the broadcast of the 1985 NBA All-Star Game being almost exclusively contained to the United States. That was his first year with the franchise, and the longtime Pacers executive has seen the game’s landscape change dramatically in the last few decades.

“This event has grown exponentially since, as it’s being broadcasted in 250 countries and in 50 languages,” Fuson said. “For the Pacers and for the city and state, you can’t buy that kind of international exposure.”

That All-Star spotlight for Haliburton and the city of Indianapolis can have a sizable impact. Perhaps no other major American sports league—certainly not MLB or the NHL and, arguably, not even the NFL—promotes its individual stars the way the NBA does, and in the nearly 50 years that Pacers have been part of the league, they’ve had only a handful of stars. Even several Pacers who were legitimate stars, like Jermaine O’Neal, didn’t have the juice Haliburton does.

The fact is that Indianapolis has never hosted an event like this, on an international stage like this, while also having a player like this. Not even Super Bowl XLVI checked all three of those boxes, as the Indianapolis Colts had no superstar to push to the hordes. In 2012, they were sitting firmly between Peyton Manning’s era ending and Andrew Luck’s tenure beginning and felt galaxies away from participating in a game of that magnitude.

In this event, Haliburton is not only playing. He’s starting and doing so when both “Indianapolis” and “Indiana” will be mentioned over and over again on a worldwide broadcast. The city and state can attach their star’s face to the place, to foster a meaningful connection with folks who have never stepped foot in the Circle City.

“There’s no question that Tyrese has real star power,” said Sean Deveney, NBA editor for Heavy.com who has covered the league for over two decades. “When you talk to him, when you watch interviews with him, he’s got a certain, a certain quality that translates to a wide audience and certainly [to] his style of play—it’s fun.”

“I think he could come out of this weekend with a much higher profile, which is obviously something the Pacers would like,” Deveney said. “And I think the league would like it, as well.”

Ready for launch

NBA All-Star Weekend comes to Indianapolis in the season that Haliburton (and the Pacers, for that matter) has begun his ascent. He was an All-Star last year, too, his first full season as a member of the Blue and Gold, but after missing 26 games due to injury and the Pacers being a non-factor, nobody was watching.

This second All-Star season has had plenty of eyeballs and appears to be his true coming-out party. The Pacers’ surprise In-Season Tournament run in November and December gave them some unexpected attention, with high-profile wins over the Bucks and Celtics, plus a nationally televised title bout with LeBron James and the blueblood Lakers. Haliburton was the hero in several of those games’ big moments, netting his first career triple-double in the quarterfinals against Boston and nailing the game-clinching shot against Milwaukee in the semis.

Even in a loss to LA in the final, nearly 4.6 million viewers tuned in to see Haliburton and the Pacers, the largest audience for a non-Christmas NBA regular-season game since 2018 and easily one of the most substantial Indiana has seen in the last decade.

For those who were dismissive of the NBA’s manufactured event, it mattered to make Haliburton and the Pacers relevant to basketball fans who might never have gotten the chance to actually watch either in action. For a franchise that probably lumps in with the Milwaukee Brewers or Tennessee Titans in the average American pro sports fan consciousness, and for a player who was a lightly regarded recruit, spent two college seasons in the middle of nowhere in Iowa, and began his pro career with the Sacramento Kings—historically the NBA’s Siberia—that’s a big deal. The fact that all of this has happened in the months leading up to Haliburton’s All-Star appearance on his team’s home turf in Indiana is something even league officials have noticed.

“Tyrese has captivated fans across the world and has made the Pacers one of the league’s most fun teams to watch,” said Joey Graziano, NBA head of global event strategy and development. “The NBA All-Star activation on the JW Marriott showing Haliburton … is a fitting metaphor for his impact on the season thus far.”

An advantageous delay

If this event had taken place when originally intended, Haliburton would’ve been over 2,000 miles from Indiana and still virtually anonymous. That’s because Indianapolis was pegged as host of the 2021 NBA All-Star Weekend, when Haliburton was barely halfway through his rookie season with the Kings. However, due to the pandemic, the city and state instead took on the responsibility of hosting every game of the 2021 NCAA Tournament that March, pushing All-Star Game hosting duties to Atlanta.

That decision might have tacked on an extra three years to a 36-year wait for the city, but it gave Indianapolis time—something that ended up being very worthwhile.

In the interim, the Pacers swung a blockbuster trade for Haliburton, injecting life into a mostly forgettable roster that was slogging its way to a 34-38 season in March 2021. Besides a face-lift for the team, Indiana also spruced up Gainbridge Fieldhouse, now 24 years old. The $400 million renovation, completed in late 2022, was the largest in NBA history and added noticeable upgrades throughout the building, the gorgeous Bicentennial Unity Plaza, and a proper stage for Sunday night’s main event.

Downtown has also had more time to rebound from the pandemic’s aftereffects, which still had a firm stranglehold on the city in early 2021. Hotel occupancy is now rising, and billions in economic development projects are in various stages of completion.

For those outside Indy’s usual sphere of influence, Haliburton is the bridge, the relevant and attractive star that makes Indianapolis sexy, cool and relevant and can link this city to fans a world away.

Think about what Giannis Antetokounmpo has done for the city of Milwaukee. The Greek icon has one of the largest social media followings of any NBA player and has turned the Bucks—the Milwaukee Bucks! —into one of the most-watched teams on linear TV and on NBA League Pass on the planet. Lori Nickel of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote about a student journalist in Beijing and a taxi driver in Croatia who know about Milwaukee, America’s 31st-largest city, and its geographical location simply because they are Giannis fans.

He’s turned an aging city and historic also-ran franchise in the middle of flyover country into a place and team that garners international attention. Sure, championship ring and MVP awards help, but the NBA All-Star Game has always been the first touch point toward establishing that connection between the fans thousands of miles away and the random American city their favorite player represents.

Haliburton can have that same impact on Indianapolis, and that starts with this All-Star Game stage.

For major sporting events in the past, it is Indy that has been the star. That was certainly the case with Super Bowl XLVI, when incomparable organization and incredibly fluky weather combined to make this place the toast of the NFL world for a once-in-a-lifetime week. The city also pulled it off in 2021 with the all-Indiana NCAA Tournament undertaking and in 2022 with the epic college football clash between Georgia and Alabama. This time feels different, though, as the NBA All-Star Game provides a global stage with even bigger stakes.

This time, Indianapolis has something besides just itself to show—a superstar, face and most important, a connection point—to basketball fans across the globe. By leaning into each other this weekend, both Indy and Haliburton can shine brighter for the world than ever before.•