Giannis Antetokounmpo apparently was not the only one who got into it with John Haliburton during the first-round playoff series between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Indiana Pacers.
Making a radio appearance Monday on ESPN Milwaukee, Craig Karmazin, the CEO of Good Karma Brands who is also a part-owner of the Bucks, revealed that John Haliburton, the father of Indiana Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton, had an incident with a fan in Game 3 of the series. That game, which the Bucks won 117-101, was held at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisc., and the incident resulted in Karmazin having to step in to separate John from the fan.
“Tyrese’s dad, he was getting into a fight after Game 3 with a fan,” said Karmazin, per Awful Announcing. “I got in between it. One of our fans was being pretty obnoxious and talking smack to him. He was talking smack, saying, ‘You may beat us in Game 4, but I guarantee you won’t win a game in Indiana, so we’re gonna win this series.’ There were expletives going back and forth between [him and the] fan.
“I was kind of worried about where it was gonna go and about him posting something on social media that the fans were harassing him or any of that,” Karmazin added of John. “So I kind of grabbed him by the shoulders from behind … And I was just there trying to defuse the whole situation, but I clearly was not able to defuse him. It didn’t carry over long-term.”
Milwaukee won Game 3 to pull to within 2-1 in the series against Indiana, but they ended up dropping the next two games to end their season. After the Game 5 clincher, which was hosted by the Pacers, John walked onto the floor immediately following the final buzzer in order to taunt the Bucks star Antetokounmpo (video here). That led to Antetokounmpo confronting John in the stands several moments later.
John has since apologized for the altercation with Antetokounmpo but was ultimately booted from Pacers’ playoff games for the remainder of the season. Meanwhile, Tyrese Haliburton has said multiple times that he believes his father’s actions were wrong. Now it has emerged that the Antetokounmpo incident was not even the only one that John had over the course of that first-round series.
