Payton Pritchard is on the Boston Celtics bench when he feels a tap on his shoulder. It is late April, and Boston has built a 103-98 lead over the Philadelphia 76ers with just over a minute left in Game 3 of their first-round series. A road win in Philadelphia is within reach. Pritchard has already hit five 3-pointers that night, and he turns to find a man even shorter than he is, a rarity on NBA courts, dressed entirely in black. Black leather jacket, black T-shirt, black baseball cap. Against that backdrop sits a blinged-out Roman numeral III necklace that glints under the arena lights.
“Oh, s—,” Pritchard thinks. “That’s …”
Allen Iverson looks at Pritchard and says: “You’re the coldest white boy I’ve ever seen.”
The Iso King
Pritchard has a strong case for being cold. Nobody in the league posted a better effective field goal percentage on isolation plays last season than Pritchard, who recorded 58.6%. He finished ahead of Nikola Jokic (57.1%), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (56.4%) and Luka Doncic (55.8%). At the midpoint of the 2025-26 season, he was averaging 1.30 points per isolation possession (minimum 100 possessions), according to Stat Defender. Had he maintained that pace, it would have been the highest mark by any player in the past decade. He tailed off in the second half of the campaign, but NBA.com still recorded his 1.11 points per possession for the season as third-highest in the league, behind Doncic and Gilgeous-Alexander.
He is the NBA’s unlikeliest iso king. So in the presence of Iverson, the patron saint of undersized iso kings, Pritchard’s most urgent thought is simple: “That’s AI.”
His second-most urgent thought follows quickly: “I gotta turn up. Now I gotta go crazy.”
The Celtics have been toying with the Sixers in the fourth quarter, letting them close the gap late in the game, down by three, then one, then two. With a little more than a minute left, Pritchard decides to break Philadelphia’s spirit. Play-by-play commentator Eric Collins shouts on the broadcast: “HE’S A KILLER,” as Pritchard drains a step-back 26-footer just as the buzzer sounds.
Pritchard saves his biggest fireworks for Game 4, two days later. He drills a one-legged, buzzer-beating 3 at the end of the first quarter. He carries Boston through the first half, scoring 18 points to the starting five’s combined 24. He finishes the night with 32 points, a career-high in both the regular season and the playoffs.
Pritchard does all this from the bench, because that is his role. He is the gold standard for bench players and was named Sixth Man of the Year two seasons ago. He can also start, as he did for 50 games last season after Jrue Holiday left for Portland and Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles. Even so, he has long been labelled a gimmick, whether for his half-court heaves, his viral handles or his late first-round draft position. He has rarely looked the part of an NBA player, let alone a star, or even a starter, for one of the league’s heavyweights.
“He’s 6-1 soaking wet,” says Celtics assistant coach Sam Cassell. That is not quite accurate, yet somehow it is exactly right.
If this countercultural iso star is a killer, he is a trained one. For years, Pritchard has held offseason workouts that, to those close to him, recall some of the greatest one-name guards in the sport’s history. They take place in anonymous gyms, and they are open only to those who dare to meet him, and defend him, at his level.
The Celtics will need every bit of that, and of him.
A Humid Gym
Boston relied heavily on Pritchard’s services before last postseason unravelled. The Celtics had a 3-1 series lead over Philadelphia and lost Game 7 in a result that left fans nauseous. Afterwards, they traded Jaylen Brown to, of all places, Philadelphia.
Now, if the Celtics hope to reclaim their place at the top of an Eastern Conference that has grown only more cutthroat, they need Pritchard to be even colder.
“There’s just something about a humid gym,” Pritchard says.
It is 6:45 in the morning in mid-June, and Pritchard has just walked into the humid gym of his choice, at a high school on the south-eastern tip of Cape Cod. He pulled up to the school grounds 10 minutes earlier but had to wait outside while his trainer, Michael Soares, phoned a staffer to unlock the double doors.
Like most of the unglamorous gyms Pritchard selects for his offseason work, this one has no air-conditioning. A few years ago, a heatwave hit West Linn, Oregon, where Pritchard grew up. Outside, temperatures climbed to 115 degrees, and inside the gym at his old high school, where he was training, it reached 120. Pritchard came prepared with extra towels, because even the ball was sweating that day.
The conditions on Cape Cod are mild by comparison. Pritchard likes the muck anyway.
The muck is why, for years, he has recruited Division II and Division III players, international players and hometown friends to high school gyms. They are not a polished group of professionals, and Pritchard reckons that makes them hungry. He will pay for their petrol to drive from Boston to the Cape, or their flights across the country or an ocean, because they can be counted on to play feisty, relentless one-on-one defence.
Today, as always, the work is a matter of repetition. Bump his defender, create space, shoot. Beat his defender, get to his spot, shoot. React when his defender chases him. Drive to the basket because the defender is chasing from too far behind.
About 30 minutes in, Bruce Saintilus, recently of Division III Clark University and one of Pritchard’s defenders for the summer, is the one doing the chasing. He is convinced he has forced Pritchard into a bad angle. But Saintilus runs past the basket, so he misses Pritchard’s awkward layup. He knows anyway. He shouts over to Soares, or perhaps to the basketball gods, who have forsaken him and his defence: “Did that really go in?”
This routine repeats for close to two hours, about three times a week, throughout the summer. Pritchard completes around 150 possessions in an elaborate dance around the court: the block, the elbow, the other elbow, the 3-point line, the corner, the wing, the high slot, the middle, the opposite slot. He goes one-on-one against a rotating cast of defenders. They get breaks; he does not. If Pritchard shoots under 60% on the day, his defenders eat like kings at Chipotle and send him the bill.
He considers that a small price for the thousands of live looks he gets over the summer, and for the chance to square up against one opponent, try to beat him, then do it again and again, filing every rep away in his mental archive. How much basketball data is too much? For Pritchard, the limit does not exist.
“My approach is probably a little different,” he concedes.
Dave Lewin, the Celtics’ assistant general manager, would go further. He says the approach is Kyrie Irving-esque. Lewin spent the early part of his career in Cleveland, within Irving’s orbit, and if he walked into the facility at night, there was a good chance Irving was there too, playing one-on-one.
“They’re obviously different,” Lewin says. “But in their approach to playing one-on-one as a form of skill development, those are the two players I’ve seen do it the most.”
Pritchard’s fixation started early. As a high school player, he trained at ClubSport, a gym near West Linn. He was never a physical marvel. “Unassuming-looking,” his former high school coach, Eric Viuhkola, says with a gentle touch. “It wasn’t like LeBron James coming through the gym.”
Even so, he caught the eye of another local gymgoer. Steve Blake was nearing the end of a 13-year journeyman NBA career, but he formed a bond with the teenager. Before Pritchard’s sophomore year, Blake picked him up for one-on-one sessions three times a week, sometimes four, throughout the entire summer. Pritchard lost, and lost again, which surprised precisely nobody except Pritchard.
“It just destroyed me,” he says. “Every day.”
He made it his life’s mission to get the better of Blake by the end of the summer. Brian Scalabrine, who became one of Boston’s most beloved benchwarmers in the early 2000s and now works as the team’s TV analyst, laughs at the ambition. “Delusional, right?” he says. “Thinking a 15-year-old kid is going to turn around and beat an NBA player.”
Pritchard never did beat Blake, but he kept coming back for more. When it came to basketball, his answer was always more.
Another day in high school, Pritchard turned up to Viuhkola’s practice with his hands bandaged. His father, Terry, had found a pair of weighted balls to sharpen his ballhandling. Pritchard dribbled them for so long that they rubbed his skin raw.
If he was not bleeding, literally or figuratively, he was not trying. Or at least, he thought, not trying hard enough.
Comfort became its own kind of discomfort. His high school teammate Brooks DeBisschop once noticed Pritchard contorting his body at his desk in class. Pritchard explained that it was a good chance to work on his hip mobility.
His lunch break was a good chance to squeeze in some plyometrics. Pritchard already attended early-morning and after-school practices, so he met Terry at the high school track in the only free time he had left. He had read that Russell Westbrook made a huge leap between his sophomore and junior years, and Pritchard reasoned that he needed to hone his athleticism to do the same.
Pritchard insists there is a straight line from those battles with Blake, those in-class hip stretches and those lunchtime plyometric sessions to his current obsession with one-on-one. He is the NBA’s maddest scientist, and those one-on-ones are his microscope, a way to examine his game at an atomic level.
Sleight of Body
In Game 5 of last season’s series against the Sixers, early in the second quarter, Pritchard drove hard to the basket and veer-stepped past Joel Embiid, who is 11 inches taller and 75 pounds heavier. Pritchard put his shoulder into the centre, and Embiid flew back a good five or six feet.
“He’s knocking Joel Embiid off his spot to get a layup,” Scalabrine says. “There’s probably a good chance LeBron’s not knocking Embiid off his spot to get a layup.”
If it seems odd that Pritchard can defy the basic principles of physics by bodying Embiid, that is because he is not really defying science. It is sleight of hand, or more accurately, sleight of body.
“People always say Payton might be one of the strongest pound-for-pound players,” Soares says. “But really, he just knows how to use other players’ bodies against them. He truly knows when to use his opponents’ inertia or speed or direction against them.”
He has tested this thousands of times, perhaps double-digit thousands, Pritchard estimates. He has done it against European professionals and semi-professionals, and against players who are professional practisers. They defend him, give him looks, and go again and again, harder and harder, until the lesson settles into his muscles.
And because there is something about a humid gym, he always returns to that lab.
“He’s an absolute outlier for what he does,” Scalabrine says. That explains the fever-dream quality of the Pritchard basketball experience. It defies logic. Here is a 6-1 guard, soaking wet, who lives in the paint and elbows his way into elite company. Last season, 57 players attempted at least 200 shots in the key (the non-restricted area). Pritchard ranked third among them, shooting 56%, behind Jokic and Kevin Durant.
A guard who rarely gets the starting nod almost always gets the ball at the end of possessions. In 2025-26 he made 86 field goals with four or fewer seconds left on the shot clock, 12 more than Durant, his nearest competitor. His effective field goal percentage on those shots was 51.6%, second only to Jalen Brunson’s 51.7% among players with at least 100 attempts, according to research.
This undersized rim threat reaches the basket with power rather than speed, and the only sensible reaction is: how?
“Payton’s able to take something that shouldn’t be possible, and he can work himself through it to make it not only possible that he can survive, but he can actually thrive,” Scalabrine says. “And the only thing you can point to is this: He is a savage, an absolute savage, when it comes to the way he works.”
Pritchard is neither magician nor miracle, Scalabrine says. He is a zealot. He commits to hours of one-on-one in the offseason, and he does the same during the season. After Celtics practice, he turns into a hawker, desperate to find anyone willing to play him, one-on-one, of course.
“He’s like a lost puppy,” Scalabrine says. “‘Oh, you guys wanna play ones? You wanna play ones? Anybody want to play ones?'”
Last season, rookie John Tonje was leaving the Auerbach Center, the Celtics’ training facility, having finished a lift and already thinking about lunch. An assistant coach called him back inside with a simple instruction: come and guard Payton.
Tonje was delighted to answer the call. This is going to be great, he thought.
Then Pritchard ran off 17 shots in a row.
“The dude did not miss,” Tonje says. “It was embarrassing.”
Nana Foulland, one of the Celtics’ player enhancement coaches, began counting off Pritchard’s consecutive makes. Tonje pressured up, and Pritchard got an angle and went past him. One! Tonje cut off the drive, but Pritchard was already on to his second counter, pulling up for a contested fadeaway. Two!
Head coach Joe Mazzulla joined Foulland to watch. He folded his arms, which for Mazzulla counts as excitement, and took in the action from half court as Pritchard went about his dismantling.
At some point, Tonje accepted his fate. Unless he blocked Pritchard’s shot or stole the ball, Pritchard’s shot was going in.
“That was my welcome to the league moment,” Tonje says. “There was just no missing.”
The Breakout Question
Back at the high school on Cape Cod, Pritchard’s shirt, light grey when he arrived just after dawn, is nearly black with sweat within the hour. He takes a rare breather, but not a break. He hunches over a laptop with another trainer, Rocky DeAndrade, studying Brunson footage. They are conducting a forensic analysis to work out how the 6-foot-2 Brunson became one of the best players in the world at drawing fouls.
Brunson has just won NBA Finals MVP, so plenty of players want to be more like him. Pritchard, diminutive, crafty, iso-dominant and now without Jaylen Brown, might be uniquely placed to make a run at becoming the next Brunson. Or at least the next Brunson-adjacent.
“If he has a season we think he could have, it may be perceived as a breakout,” Lewin says. “But I think we’ll view it as a continuation of the things he’s done well in the past, when given the opportunity. Some of the really promising isolation development and midrange shooting that he had last year, with more of the 3-point shooting success he had earlier in his career.”
The Celtics will need that breakout, or continuation, because someone will have to help Tatum fill the Brown-shaped hole in Boston. Paul George has joined the team at 36 and is on the downside of his offensive career. Even if the responsibility is shared, Pritchard is likely to become the de facto leader of that group.
Early returns this season have been modest, but those in and around the Celtics are bullish on Pritchard’s ability to step up. “I think he’s going to average, like, over 22 points a game,” Scalabrine says. The rest of the league appears to agree. In this year’s NBA general manager survey, released on the eve of the 2026-27 season, the top candidates for breakout players included a host of recent top-10 picks on the cusp of their second seasons: Dylan Harper, Cooper Flagg and Collin Murray-Boyles. Pritchard, a former top-26 pick now entering his seventh season, also earned votes.
These are encouraging signs for the Celtics.
“We’ve asked him to be more for us every single year,” Mazzulla says. “He has the ability to take on whatever the team needs at that particular time, you know?”
So it is never a bad time to tap into your inner Jalen Brunson. For Pritchard and the Celtics, now is the perfect time. The Celtics are not looking for someone to become a world-beating No. 1 option, because they already have one in Tatum. That is fortunate, because even being Brunson-adjacent is a heavy lift.
Pritchard loves a doubter. Back in high school, he kept a burn book listing his detractors and their criticisms: too short, too unathletic, too slow, too bad, so sad. His own father earned a place in it simply for suggesting that Pritchard consider some Ivy League programmes during recruiting.
Even now, Pritchard still needles a scout who once texted one of Pritchard’s college coaches a bleak assessment during the draft process. “Don’t think he’s gonna be an NBA player,” the scout wrote. “Maybe a good overseas player, at best,” naming a player called Kevin Pangos. Pritchard has no quarrel with Pangos, the former Gonzaga standout and two-time All-EuroLeague honouree, but he says he was chasing something bigger.
So there are people who doubt Pritchard has it in him? Good. If nobody had declared it a fool’s errand for him to chase something bigger, to chase even the likes of Brunson, he would have found them anyway.
“There’s always doubters,” he says. “There’s always the next step that people think you can’t get to. So you search for that and you find it.”
Always Betting on Payton
On the last day of September, with the Celtics two days into training camp, Pritchard and Mazzulla hold a two-man huddle on the practice court. There is plenty of hand waving, and at one point Mazzulla elbows Pritchard, perhaps to demonstrate the play they are working out.
It looks very serious, because Mazzulla is famously very serious. Then something startling happens: Mazzulla breaks character and breaks into a genuine smile.
Mazzulla likes Pritchard. What is more, he likes to count on him.
“I’ll always bet on Payton,” Mazzulla says.
It was not always this wholesome. When Mazzulla was still an assistant with the Celtics, he loved to get his hands dirty and play five-on-five. One day he ended up on the same side as Pritchard. The scrimmage turned testy, and Mazzulla got blunt.
“You don’t make people better,” he barked at Pritchard.
Pritchard bristled. All he had ever done was work himself ragged. Yet his primal need to outwork, outlast and even outlive everyone was both his greatest asset and his biggest flaw.
Zack Gonzales, one of Pritchard’s former graduate assistants at Oregon, watched Pritchard as an upperclassman try to break the spirit of a freshman guard, day after day. “Payton’s goal every day was to make him cry,” Gonzales says. “He was like, ‘I’m gonna kill him.'”
So Mazzulla was effectively warning Pritchard that he was repeating history. Pritchard had such tunnel vision about outdoing everyone that he forgot to bring anyone else along.
Age and experience, and a later letter from Mazzulla offering an olive branch, have blunted those sharp edges. Pritchard has a softer touch these days. The timing did not work out, but he had hoped to host the Celtics’ newest arrivals at his workout bootcamp on Cape Cod. He is also a little less inclined to kill, though John Tonje might want a word.
“A menace,” said Mike Conley, who joined the Celtics this season, in the early days of training camp. “He’s an absolute crazy person when it comes to trying to improve his game.”
That relentlessness is what got Pritchard here: the bench star and sometimes starter, the heave god and the league’s most unexpected iso god, and the owner of a two-year, $44.2 million extension that will keep him a Celtic through 2030. He is also a cornerstone of what comes next.
“I can’t wake up,” he says, “and be Wemby.”