I’m taking the All-Star, All-NBA player, Jeff Teague on Tyrese Haliburton-Jalen Johnson Debate

On a recent episode of Club 520, with the usual mix of laughter, interruptions and escalating disbelief bouncing around the table, Jeff Teague was asked the kind of basketball question that always sounds simple until it starts a fight. If you were starting a team today, would you take Tyrese Haliburton or Jalen Johnson? Teague did not need long to answer the question.

Before the room could really settle into the argument, Teague cut straight to the point. He wanted Haliburton. He wanted the All-NBA guard, the one who had already been through the playoff fire and came out of it looking bigger than before.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, it became the beginning of a better story. Because even though Teague never actually took Johnson over Haliburton in the full exchange, the fact that the debate kept growing is because where Johnson now stands in the league’s imagination.

He is the engine of the Atlanta Hawks surge that has pushed the club to 45-33 and fifth place in the East with four games left, and he has become the kind of player people can plausibly mention in franchise-building arguments without sounding reckless.

Haliburton, meanwhile, remains the absent star hanging over Indiana’s lost season, with the Pacers 18-60 and 13th in the conference while he recovers from the Achilles tear that ended his Finals run and wiped out his 2025-26 campaign. One player is making the future feel close. The other already owns the hardest kind of basketball proof. That was the real argument on the table.

1. Why Teague Still Picked the All-NBA Star

The interviewer B Henn sets the table cleanly, “If you’re starting a team, who are you taking? Tyrese Haliburton or Jalen Johnson?” Teague answers, “I’m taking Tyrese Haliburton. I’m taking the All-Star, All-NBA player.” DJ Wells answers from the other side: “He just made All-Star. Both of them stars. I’m taking Jalen Johnson—6’10” point guard.” That’s when Teague brings the argument back to earth. “He cold, for sure… but I ain’t seen him do what Tyrese did yet. Let’s go to the playoff averages. Let’s go to the 4th quarter averages. When it’s time to win? Tyrese.”

2. Jalen Johnson Is UNDENIABLE

A year ago, this kind of argument would have sounded premature. Now it sounds inevitable. Johnson has turned himself into one of the defining players of Atlanta’s season, and Atlanta has turned itself into one of the East’s most difficult late-season stories to ignore. The Hawks enter Monday in fifth place at 45-33, carrying a four-game winning streak and an 18-2 run over their last 20 games. That is not the profile of a team waiting for next year. That is the profile of a team arriving faster than expected. Johnson has been at the center of that shift. In March he averaged 22 points, nine rebounds and nine assists and was named Eastern Conference Player of the Month, recognition that signaled something larger than a hot stretch. It told the league that his development had crossed over from promising to consequential. Atlanta was not merely watching him blossom. It was winning through him. Johnson’s rise is not just statistical. It is structural. He rebounds like a frontcourt player, handles and passes like an initiator, and increasingly bends possessions in ways that make defenses choose the wrong problem to solve. He can start a break, finish one, or detour it into something cleaner. The Hawks have become more elastic because he has. That is what Wells was really arguing for when he made the “6’10” point guard” case. He was not reciting measurements. He was describing a roster-shaping archetype. And Atlanta’s season gives that archetype a proper stage.

3. Haliburton’s Clutch Legacy and the Pacers’ Collapse That Proves His Value

Haliburton made All-NBA Third Team after averaging 18.6 points and 9.2 assists in 73 regular-season games in 2024-25. But Teague was not sounding protective of a regular-season honor roll. He was sounding protective of what Haliburton became once Indiana’s season crossed into playoff time. Haliburton’s 2025 postseason changed his standing because it gave him something more durable than box-score shine. Across the regular season and playoffs, he shot 12-for-14 on game-tying or go-ahead shots in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime, the best mark recorded in a single season in the play-by-play era dating back to 1996-97. Haliburton averaged 17.3 points and 8.6 assists over 23 playoff games as the Pacers advanced to the Finals, where his run ended in the cruelest possible way; a torn right Achilles in Game 7 against Oklahoma City. The injury was devastating on its own, but it also froze his image in a particular place: as the lead guard of a Finals team, carried off the stage just as his reputation had fully arrived. Now Indiana is living through the part of the story that tends to make an absent star look even larger. The Pacers have fallen to 18-60 without him, a collapse that does not all belong to one injury but still speaks loudly. Haliburton’s absence has made his value more visible. The offense no longer looks the same, the season no longer feels pointed at anything large, and the distance between last June and this April has become the quietest part of Teague’s argument.

• Tags:
• Tyrese Haliburton
• Jalen Johnson
• Jeff Teague