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With the bulk of the 2026 NBA offseason’s player movement now concluded, and with the calendar now flipped to August, it’s time to start looking ahead to what’s coming next in the NBA, both this season and afterward.
In that spirit, and in the interest of killing some time in the depths of the summer, let’s take a look at the five* most interesting players — to me! — who’ll be making a comeback this season after missing all or more of last season.
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(We previously considered my five most interesting potential free agents in the class of 2027.)
We begin with a man coming back after one false step cost him nearly everything:
When last we saw Haliburton, he had nine points in the first seven minutes of a tied Game 7 of the NBA Finals. He opened the biggest game of his life on fire, looking for all the world like a man intent on completing his monthslong mission: delivering Indiana’s first championship since the ABA and doing so by etching his name into the pantheon of all-time big-game crunch-time killers.
We know what happened after that, and why Haliburton missed the entirety of the 2025-26 NBA season. It’s not exactly as simple as saying that his absence explains the Pacers cratering from a 50-win offensive incineration machine into a 19-win squad with one of the league’s most feckless attacks; Myles Turner was also gone, and every other member of their 2025 playoff rotation besides Pascal Siakam missed a ton of time with injuries. But when one player is so singularly responsible for every element of orchestrating your offense — of injecting pace and danger into the game; of making everyone else’s offensive life easier, and sometimes even tenable; of finding the most direct pathway to points on any given possession, even (maybe especially) if it’s a pathway nobody else can see — it’s also not not that simple.
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Since he arrived in Indianapolis at the 2022 trade deadline, the Pacers have gone as Haliburton goes. When he was there, they made consecutive Eastern Conference finals, found something like total basketball harmony, and came one win shy of the ultimate prize. When he was gone, so…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/the-nbas-most-interesting-comeback-players-155537109.html
Author : Dan Devine
Publish date : 2026-08-21 15:55:00
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