What if you, a professional at your craft, a dedicated and ideal employee, a leader of men on the most public of stages, were called overrated by your peers?
How would you digest this information?
For years, you’ve strived to be the best you can be. You’ve made your mark in your industry, or your company. You are in a place, both personally and professionally, where you are comfortable with who you are and what you do.
Until.
Word on the street is that your peers don’t think you’re as good as you are.
You’re overrated, the worst kind of Big O imaginable.
The confident, rational person probably couldn’t care less about what others have to say about them. They know what they bring to the table. They are comfortable in their own skin, as it took them a long time to get there.
But still, such information must sting, hearing that others don’t recognize your hard work, effort and talent. A more fragile ego might not take too kindly to the news. We’ve seen it happen before, where it hasn’t ended well.
We live in a time when opinions run rampant and can be heard as far as the internet can stretch. And you know what they say about opinions.
I imagine professional athletes care far less about what the average fan or media member thinks, those who might not understand the sacrifice. The average fan doesn’t know jack, today’s credentialed journalists perhaps less. I can say this player sucks, or that player’s useless, and the player in question wouldn’t pay it any mind. Haters are going to hate.
But when peers make a crack at your worth, that must resonate louder than comments coming from the average, uninformed, armchair quarterback.
Earlier this season, in an NBA player poll hosted by the Athletic, the pay-per-read, online sports edition of the New York Times, Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers was voted the league’s most overrated player by a jury of his peers.
(In a feeble attempt at hard-hitting, if not rabble-rousing, investigative journalism, in the same poll, the Athletic asked other incisive questions like who they felt was the league’s most overrated coach, its worst run organization, and which NBA player that they’d least like to fight. Players were also asked which team, other than their own, would win an NBA title this season. Note: less than 1% chose the Indiana Pacers.)
I’m not sure why these questions were asked or why the peace-loving commissioner didn’t veto their existence from the start. Like anyone else, I suppose he didn’t mind the attention being paid to his league.
All this nonsense reminded me of high school polls where boys rate girls based on their looks intended only to hurt feelings, or that infamous Orlando Sentinel poll which once asked fans whether the Magic franchise should pay Shaquille O’Neal $100 million. They didn’t. He left town. The rest is history. Who knows whether this news inspired Shaq to evolve into the player he became. (Newsflash: it did, although he was probably due that anyway.)
One thing is for certain.
A la Shaq, Haliburton took the overrated news to heart. He heard the noise and didn’t like it. Despite his polished response to the poll, there’s no way his mind’s bulletin board didn’t crumble those results like Rocky Balboa’s mirror-side picture of Apollo Creed.
In a rather impressive display of focus and introspection, Haliburton drowned out the noise, focused on what he could control and led his Indiana Pacers to Game Seven of the NBA Finals, beating Milwaukee, Cleveland and New York. It might not have been good enough for others. It was good enough for him and damn sure good enough for his teammates.
We’ll never know exactly how much this poll was responsible for Hali’s torrid run throughout the second half of the season, and post-season, where he regularly launched buzzer-beating game-winners as if he were channeling the spirit of former NBA greats, grabbing his neck in front of an arena full of rabid New Yorkers (they still hate him) or gesturing to the size of his, ahem, testicular fortitude.
Few men can say they were the best player on a team that made the Finals but never won. Reggie Miller, Allen Iverson, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Gary Payton, Charles Barkley. All these men were legends of their generation and retired without a title. Not a soul would dream of calling them overrated. And yet, for whatever reason, Haliburton remains our latest target, damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
A basketball team starts five, benches more, and is supported by an entire organization of people behind the scenes, some names you know, many you don’t. When those teams fail to achieve the goals many of us have set for them, but more importantly that they’ve set for themselves, one man unfairly takes the rap. That’s how it is. That’s how it will be. It’s the lifestyle they have signed up for, along with the guff that comes with it.
We find inspiration in the oddest of places. Tyrese Haliburton sure did. Knowing what was at stake, Haliburton literally left it all out on the floor in Game Seven, a likely torn Achilles, all but carried off the floor, towel over his head to mask the tears and pain. We witnessed a man who played in a game and understood the consequences. So begins his road to recovery, one he’s already taken mentally and now must take physically.
Haliburton has already done something many players of his generation have yet to do, been the best player on a team that just missed a championship. And while falling short of his goal might not shed the overrated label media buffoons would have you believe, you won’t ever be reading that here.
After watching what we just saw from him, I’m guessing we won’t be reading it elsewhere either.
Respect.
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Must not be that overrated when he gets injured and ultimately his team gets blown out without him on the court. Lots of people needing to eat their words. Lots of Knicks fans have his blood on their hands for wishing ill of him (as if he was the only reason the Knicks haven’t won a championship since 8 years before I was even born lol).
BCole…
The identities of those ill-willing Knicks fans have been hidden to protect their bitter embarrassment.
But I have those texts for safe keeping …. in case I neeeeed it.
No way is he overrated. Halliburton was the difference maker for that Pacers team. They were still very good without him and stepped up rather than giving up, but without him they needed perfection from the rest of the team to beat OKC and needed OKC to slip. Didn’t happen. Shame we didn’t get to see the outcome with both teams at full strength.
Bucks, Cavs and Knick fans would all agree that T Haliburton is severely “underrated” as a basketball player, BUT, if he does have a weakness, it is that he is severely susceptible to voodoo from the same group of fans!
Go OKC!!!!