Kevin Love talks Team USA Basketball ahead of 2024 Paris Olympics.
Tyrese Haliburton is one of the NBA's brightest young stars, a two-time all-star who just guided the Pacers to the Eastern Conference Finals, all before his 25th birthday.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, he had a decidedly more muted role for Team USA and was just one of two American players not to log a minute in his team's victory against France in the gold-medal game Saturday.
Despite doing little to contribute to his team's triumph, Haliburton became something of a riddle. What do you call a player who didn't see the floor for a team that won the championship game at the Olympics? A gold medalist.
REQUIRED READING: Report: East finalist Pacers left off NBA Christmas Day schedule for 20th straight year
Perhaps no one is more aware of that fact than Haliburton.
In the moments after the Team USA's 98-87 win against the host nation, Haliburton took to social media, posting a picture of him holding up his newly earned gold medal, along with a hilarious caption and comparison.
"When you ain't do nun on the group project and still get an A," Haliburton wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Haliburton did not play in the Americans' final two victories of the Olympics, tight wins against Serbia in the semifinals and France in the title game. Over Team USA's six games in the Olympics, three of which he didn't play in, Haliburton had eight points across 26 minutes.
It's a stark contrast to his standing with the Pacers, for whom he has been the team's leading scorer for each of the past two seasons and is, by virtually any measurement, the current face of the franchise.
Accepting such a diminished role isn't always easy, as these Olympics have shown. Though he personally didn't make any disparaging comments publicly, Celtics star Jayson Tatum not playing in two of the Americans' games, including the semifinal win against Serbia, elicited criticism of Team USA coach Steve Kerr, with biting words coming from the likes of Tatum's mother and Celtics legend Bob Cousy.
In that sense, the way Haliburton conducted himself over the past several weeks was almost as important as anything he could have done on the court. Rather than stewing in frustration and disappointment, if not outright anger, and threatening to destabilize the chemistry of an all-star team that's not used to playing with one another, he was one of 12 players in Paris Saturday standing on the podium with a gold medal around his neck.
Refreshingly, he was even able to find a little humor in it, too.