Tyrese Haliburton is now only two wins away from carrying the Indiana Pacers to one of the more improbable NBA championships in recent memory. He's rewritten his narrative during the postseason by capping miraculous comeback after miraculous comeback. But where is he in the real battle—having media pundits acknowledge him as a superstar?

Perhaps not as far along as one may suspect, and he could be getting further away from it after some rather innocuous comments following Game 3.

"The commentary is always going to be what it is," Haliburton said when asked about all the calls for him to be more aggressive from the sports world. "Most of the time the talking heads on the major platforms, I couldn't care less, honestly. What do they really know about basketball?... At a time like this I'm not really on social media as much. I try to stay off it as much as I can. But you see it. ESPN might be on in my house, and there it is. It is what it is."

Pretty tame right? He hears the chatter, he doesn't care about it and correctly points out that some of the critiques shouldn't carry much weight considering the expertise of the person making them and the incentive structure that rewards conflict.

Not to Stephen A. Smith, who has addressed the tepid commentary with his usual passion on Thursday's First Take.

"You see how slick these dudes get," Smith said. "They try to point to the media. No! It's your colleagues, it's your contemporaries, present and former, who were questioning you."

Smith then paused for dramatic effect and delivered a the type of pointed monologue.

"Just in case he was talking about me, players far more accomplished and far more superior have made their efforts trying to call me out. How has that worked out?"

In the case of LeBron James, it's worked out just fine. In the case of every other player who has gotten into it with Smith over the years, they continued to play basketball and collect lucrative paychecks while participating in the circus to varying degrees.

It once agan bears repeating that the player poll that deemed Haliburton as the league's most overrated player translated to about a dozen guys saying he gets too much credit. It once again bears repeating that this is all happening the morning after the Pacers' (super)star took control of an NBA Finals no one thought he'd be in. So time may be running out to double and triple down on anything that diminishes Haliburton's on-court performance. Makes sense that Smith would be trying to get some more of that in under the wire.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Stephen A. Smith Takes Exception to Tyrese Haliburton's 'Talking Heads' Comment.

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