Yahoo Sports Senior NBA Reporter Vincent Goodwill sat down with the Pacers guard at the USA Basketball men’s national team camp in Las Vegas to discuss Indiana’s success last season and its role as the conference’s losing team. East.
Video transcript
Now, the last time we saw you in the Eastern Conference it looked a lot different.
Now you have Paul George with Philly.
New York loaded a little first.
Do you accept being like the heel?
No one likes being the villain in the crowd, the wrestling kind of villain, anymore.
Do you like that or is it just the label we put on you?
I think it’s a label that was placed on me.
I just like playing basketball and I understand that people don’t want to see Indiana win anything that they don’t want us to win.
Well, you know, it’s a small market team.
For most of my life, Indiana was seen as, you know, boring or whatever the case may be.
Um, so I just play along, I just understand and that’s who’s in our locker room, who’s in our trip against the world party, basically, you know.
And so, um, I think that was added to me because of the competition, the Milwaukee Series, the New York Series competition.
Uh, it kind of dawned on me.
But I mean, whatever the media puts on me is whatever, whatever gets put on me, I think at the end of the day, I just want to be known as a guy who gives it our all and competes 100% and, um just trying to keep doing that.
But you kind of give you guys an identity if you lean into it, if there’s one thing that all the great teams have, they have this identity and if you’re the giant assassin, that’s something that you walk into any building and every The world knows what’s going on when Tyrese Halliburton and the Indiana Pacers are walking into your house.
Undoubtedly.
I mean, teams don’t want to take us lightly.
They know what we bring to the table offensively.
They know how we can go any night.
So I think at the end of the day, regardless of what the perception of us is, I think our teammates know they need to be ready when they play against us.
And, um, I think that’s more important than anything, that teams respect us and know that they need to be ready to play.
And now we know that we have that success, every other team in our conference, every team in the league wants to have that success too.
And then, you know, when teams play us, they’ll be ready to go.
It’s not surprising or anything.
So that’s the big part, not to say that now we’re the, we’ve gone from hunters to hunters because we haven’t won.
But I think when you have success, teams look at you like we want to have success similar to that.
Then they come to you.
And I think that’s the best part of it.
