Since the NBA’s play-by-play era began in the 1996-97 season, LeBron James has the most postseason shots to either tie or take the lead in the final three seconds of regulation or overtime with eight. Before the 2025 postseason, no one else had more than four in nearly the past 30 years.
Well, on Thursday, Tyrese Haliburton made his fourth of the 2025 playoffs alone. Haliburton has now made one such shot in each of the four rounds this postseason, doing so in Game 5 against the Milwaukee Bucks, Game 2 against the Cleveland Cavaliers and Game 1 against the New York Knicks. No one else in the play-by-play era, including James, has made at least one such shot in each of the four rounds across their entire careers. Michael Jordan did so, but didn’t complete his bingo card until the 1997 NBA Finals, his second-to-last trip to the postseason.
Haliburton has done in a single postseason what it took Jordan an entire career to do and what James still hasn’t accomplished in his 22 NBA seasons. That raises a very simple question: is Tyrese Haliburton currently having the greatest clutch playoff run in NBA history?
The answer, ultimately, comes down to your definition. If you’re measuring only the last few seconds, Haliburton is a runaway winner based on what we covered. Expand the window slightly and the answer probably stays the same — Haliburton has made six shots to tie or take the lead in the final 90 seconds of games this postseason, also the most of the play-by-play era.
The website Inpredictable has a stat called clutch win probability added. Essentially, it measures how many extra wins a player was worth in the clutch over a defined period. During this postseason, Haliburton’s clutch shooting has added an estimated 2.48 wins for the Pacers. In second place during the play-by-play era? James, at 1.86 in 2013. No one since the 1996-97 season has touched the value Haliburton’s shot-making in the clutch has generated this spring.
If you want to try to apply that value to winning, consider what statistician Micah Adams tweeted about the four games in which Haliburton made these shots. At their lowest point in terms of win probability in each of them, the Pacers’ odds of victory ranged from 3% in Game 1 of the Finals to 0.3% in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals. They obviously won all four games, and if you calculate the odds for that based on their win probability in each of them, the odds of Indiana winning all four were around one-in-75 million.
Let’s say you want to simplify this a bit. The NBA has its own, official definition for clutch: the last five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime with the scoring margin within five points. Indiana has played in nine official clutch games this postseason. It has won eight of them. That gives them a clutch winning percentage of 88.9%. That is the highest clutch winning percentage of the play-by-play era for a team that has played in at least nine clutch games.
Of course, now that we’ve opened the door to the league’s official definition of “clutch,” we have to acknowledge that clutch performance generally encompasses more than the last few seconds. Once you include the entire last few minutes, things start to get messier. Consider Haliburton’s overall clutch scoring total this postseason. He has 33 points. That’s very impressive … but one of his playoff victims, Jalen Brunson, had 56.
Haliburton is not exactly a compiler of individual numbers. Richard Jefferson joked on the broadcast that he was shooting “tour dates.” From a scoring volume perspective, he’s therefore going to struggle compared to more prolific bucket-getters. In fairness, though, clutch performance is obviously more complicated than just scoring.
A lot of Haliburton’s value comes from setting up his teammates and making sure that someone, even if it isn’t him, gets up a good look. He has an 8-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio this postseason. The Pacers have played nearly 89 clutch minutes this postseason and have only three turnovers. To bring Brunson back into this, the Knicks played almost 64 clutch minutes and turned the ball over 14 times. Haliburton’s teams don’t waste clutch possessions. They always get a shot.
Naming a single, most clutch playoff run ever therefore becomes pretty subjective. That is especially true since we only have defined clutch data from 1997 on. Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Jordan’s younger self would probably factor into these discussions pretty prominently if we could easily quantify what they were doing. With that said, there’s a short list here from the play-by-play era. It includes three seasons:
- 1998 Michael Jordan: We’ve covered him. He scored 76 points with eight assists, six rebounds, three steals and three blocks for a Bulls team that went 8-6 in the clutch. That record itself is not especially impressive, but it looks better in context. That Bulls team was on its last legs. Scottie Pippen was injured. Dennis Rodman was washed. Everyone knew they were about to break up, and Jordan still dragged them to a championship.
- 2007 LeBron James: True, he didn’t win a championship, but he took a laughable supporting cast all the way to the NBA Finals and stunned the top-seeded Detroit Pistons along the way. Aside from his 58 clutch points, he also had a ridiculous 14-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio. James obviously has his fair share of clutch moments throughout his career, but in 2007, he had arguably the greatest purely clutch game in league history. In Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals against Detroit, James scored 25 clutch points to steal home-court advantage and ultimately get the Cavaliers to the Finals.
- 2011 Dirk Nowitzki: This was about as flawless a postseason clutch run as exists in league history. Nowitzki scored 66 clutch points on 54-60-97 shooting. His Mavericks went 11-5 against a series of opponents that included Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. The crowning achievement? Dallas won his 49.6 clutch minutes by 73 total points. It took a miraculous run to win the Mavericks their first and only championship, but Nowitzki did it.
There are other candidates, but each is flawed in some meaningful way. Allen Iverson in 2001, Kobe Bryant in 2002 and Kawhi Leonard in 2019 were just a shade too inefficient to make the list. Shaquille O’Neal in 2000 would have done so easily if he could have made his free throws. A number of other James years just barely missed the cut for some reason or another. Stephen Curry shooting 9-of-16 from 3 in the clutch in 2016 should have gotten him on the list … but he and the Warriors lost Game 7 of the Finals on their home court, so no dice.
What Haliburton has done individually this postseason stands above that group. He is already, frankly, in the company of 2007 James as a surprise finalist. But what obviously stands apart when you consider 1998 Jordan and 2011 Nowitzki is that they won championships.
Haliburton is tantalizingly close to that prize. He’s just three wins away, and he can get them all at home. If he does so against a 68-win Thunder team, winning his third-consecutive series without home-court advantage in the process, his resume might become unimpeachable. No, he doesn’t score as prolifically as Jordan or Nowitzki did, but his overall impact on these games cannot be denied.
In a vacuum, he’s taking games that mathematically look like certain losses and turning them into victories. But the greater impact might be intangible. For opponents, losses like that are devastating. They can demoralize a team, and they can make them play tight in future installments in the series. Only a small number of players in NBA history have ever had that effect on their opponents in the playoffs consistently, and Haliburton is probably among them now.
If he can really pull this off — if he can win a championship as a No. 4 seed in this specific way — it would be almost impossible to refute that he’s had the most clutch playoff run in NBA history.
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