The basketball hangs in the air like a painting perched in the Louvre.
Defying gravity. Bouncing so high, the wide-angle TNT broadcast camera loses sight of it. Less of a painting, maybe, than a shooting star. Here one moment, gone the next.
Unlike those celestial rocks, however, this more terrestrial one returns. When the ball finally comes back down at an improbable angle and swishes through the net, tying Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals (a game Indiana inevitably won), it became the latest proof for a theorem that’s been developing all playoffs: Tyrese Haliburton has arrived as a Top 5 player in the NBA.
