Brandon Jennings pushes back on notion that Tyrese Haliburton is NBA’s most overrated player

In a poll of anonymous NBA players done by The Athletic, Indiana Pacers star guard Tyrese Haliburton received the most votes for an unenviable title. He was voted as the league’s most overrated player, and he earned 14.4 percent of the total vote. Minnesota Timberwolves big man Rudy Gobert finished in second place with 10 percent of the vote.

One former NBA player who doesn’t agree that Haliburton is the league’s most overrated player is Brandon Jennings, who spent nine seasons as a point guard in the league playing for the likes of the Milwaukee Bucks, Detroit Pistons and Washington Wizards. He thinks that players picked on Haliburton in the voting because they don’t like his game and he plays for a small market in Indiana.

“I don’t think he’s the most overrated player in the NBA,” Jennings said. “I mean, we can find somebody else. But yeah, I just don’t think they like his game. I think it’s just Indiana, you know? But he’s not the most overrated player in the NBA. I’m not rolling with that at all, and that list is crazy with those players.”

In the defense of the players who voted for Haliburton in that poll, he did see his scoring and passing numbers take a dip this season compared to the campaign prior. He averaged 9.2 assists per game in the 2024-25 season compared to a league-high 10.9 in the 2023-24 campaign. To boot, his scoring average went down from 20.1 points to 18.6 per contest.

Haliburton wasn’t named an All-Star earlier this year, either, after he earned selections in 2024 and 2023.

But he was the best player on a Pacers team that ended up with the No. 4 seed in the Eastern Conference with a 50-32 record. Even though Haliburton didn’t manage to lead the NBA in assists for the second season in a row, he was still one of the league’s premier facilitators. Only Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young and Denver Nuggets big man Nikola Jokic averaged more dimes per contest during the regular season, and Haliburton led the Pacers in that stat by a landslide.

Plus, he averaged the second-most points per game of any Pacer behind only big man Pascal Siakam.

Haliburton can help put assertions that he’s the league’s most overrated player to rest by leading the Pacers to a playoff series victory over the Bucks in the first round of the 2025 NBA Playoffs. Indiana holds a 2-1 series lead at the moment but is on the heels of a loss in Friday’s Game 3.