Payton Pritchard is the NBA’s most unlikely isolation scorer, and with Jaylen Brown gone, the Celtics will need him to get even better. Last season, no player in the league posted a better effective field goal percentage on isolation plays than Pritchard, who hit 58.6%. He edged out Nikola Jokic (57.1%), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (56.4%) and Luka Doncic (55.8%).
Pritchard is 5-foot-11 or so on a good day, a bench player and a former Sixth Man of the Year. Yet his most urgent instinct, when the moment calls for it, is to take over.
Pritchard is at the Celtics bench during Game 3 of the first-round playoff series in Philadelphia when he feels a tap on his shoulder. It’s late April, and Boston has built a 103-98 lead with just over a minute left. The Celtics have a habit of beating the Sixers in the postseason, and Pritchard has already drained five 3-pointers.
He turns to find a man even shorter than he is, a rarity on NBA courts for Pritchard. The man wears all black: a leather jacket, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. A blinged-out Roman numeral III hangs from his neck and catches the arena lights.
“Oh, s—,” Pritchard thinks. “That’s …”
It is Allen Iverson. He looks at Pritchard and says, “You’re the coldest white boy I’ve ever seen.”
A case study in being cold
At the midpoint of the 2025-26 season, Pritchard was averaging 1.30 points per isolation possession, minimum 100 possessions, according to Stat Defender. Had he kept that pace, it would have been the highest mark for any player in the past decade. He faded in the second half of the season, but his 1.11 points per possession for the full year, per NBA.com, still ranked third in the league, behind only Doncic and Gilgeous-Alexander.
Iverson, the patron saint of undersized isolation scorers, would appreciate the comparison. Pritchard, though, is focused on the moment. Pritchard’s first thought is, “That’s AI.” His second is, “I gotta turn up. Now I gotta go crazy.”
The Celtics have been toying with the Sixers in the fourth quarter, letting them creep close. Philadelphia has cut the margin to three, then one, then two. With a little more than a minute left, Pritchard decides to break Philadelphia’s spirit. He sinks a step-back 26-footer just as the buzzer sounds. Play-by-play announcer Eric Collins yells, “HE’S A KILLER.”
Pritchard saves his best work for Game 4, two days later. He hits a one-legged, buzzer-beating 3 at the end of the first quarter. He carries Boston in the first half, scoring 18 points to the starting five’s combined 24. He finishes with a career-high 32 points in the game and in the playoffs.
Pritchard does all of this from the bench because that is his role. He is the gold standard for bench players. He can start, too, as he did last season for 50 games after Jrue Holiday left for Portland and Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles. Some see him as a gimmick, with his half-court heaves. Others see a fundamentals guy, with his viral ball-handling clips. Still others see a player who rose above his station after a late first-round draft selection. He has never looked the part of an NBA player, let alone a star or a full-time starter for one of the league’s heavyweights.
“He’s 6-1 soaking wet,” says Celtics assistant coach Sam Cassell. That isn’t quite right, and it is also, somehow, exactly right.
If this countercultural isolation star is a killer, he is a trained one. For years, Pritchard has run offseason workouts that, to people close to him, call to mind some of the greatest one-name guards in the sport’s history. They take place in anonymous gyms, and only those who dare to meet him at his level, and defend him, are invited.
The Celtics will need every bit of that. They will need him.
Boston leaned on Pritchard before last postseason spiraled into disaster. The Celtics held a 3-1 series lead over Philadelphia, then lost Game 7 in a nausea-inducing collapse. Then they traded Brown in the offseason to, of all places, Philadelphia.
Now, if Boston wants to reclaim its place atop an Eastern Conference that has only grown more cutthroat, Pritchard has to get even colder.
The muck
“There’s just something about a humid gym,” Pritchard says.
It is 6:45 in the morning in mid-June, and Pritchard has walked into the humid gym of his choice, at a high school on the southeastern tip of Cape Cod. He pulled up 10 minutes earlier and waited outside while his trainer, Michael Soares, phoned a staffer to unlock the double doors.
Like most of the unglamorous gyms Pritchard picks for his offseason work, this one has no air-conditioning. A few years ago, a heat wave hit West Linn, Oregon, where Pritchard grew up. Outside, the temperature reached 115 degrees. Inside the gym at his high school alma mater, where he was working out, it climbed to 120. Pritchard came armed with extra towels that day because even the basketball was sweating.
The Cape Cod conditions are mild by comparison. Pritchard, however, likes the muck.
That’s why he has spent years recruiting Division II and Division III players, international players and hometown friends to high school gyms. They aren’t a polished group of pros, and Pritchard figures that makes them hungry. He pays for their gas to drive from Boston to the Cape, or their flights across the country or an ocean. In return, they play feisty, relentless one-on-one defense.
Today, as always, Pritchard’s workout is death by repetition. He bumps his defender, creates space and shoots. He beats his defender, gets to his spot and shoots. He reacts when his defender chases him. He drives to the basket because the defender is chasing him from too far behind.
About 30 minutes in, Bruce Saintilus, recently of Division III Clark University and one of Pritchard’s summer defenders, is chasing him. Saintilus is certain he has forced Pritchard into a bad angle. But he runs past the basket, so he doesn’t see Pritchard attempt an awkward layup. Saintilus knows anyway. He shouts toward Soares, or maybe toward the basketball gods, “Did that really go in?”
This routine runs for close to two hours, about three times a week, all summer. Pritchard works through roughly 150 possessions in his 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 and the opposite slot. He goes one-on-one against a rotating group of defenders. They get breaks. He doesn’t. If Pritchard shoots under 60% on a given day, his defenders eat like kings at Chipotle and then 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 man and try to beat him, again and again. He files every rep in his mental archive. How much basketball data is too much? In his view, the limit does not exist.
“My approach is probably a little different,” he concedes.
Dave Lewin, the Celtics’ assistant general manager, would call it a lot different. Lewin says the approach is Kyrie Irving-esque. He spent the early part of his career in Cleveland, in Irving’s orbit. If Lewin 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.”
Where the obsession started
Pritchard’s fixation began in high school. He trained at ClubSport, a gym near West Linn. He was never a physical marvel. “Unassuming-looking,” says his old high school coach, Eric Viuhkola, gently. “It wasn’t like LeBron James coming through the gym.”
Still, he caught the eye of another local gym regular. Steve Blake was nearing the end of a 13-year NBA journeyman career, but he struck up a kinship with the teenager. Before Pritchard’s sophomore year, Blake picked him up three or four times a week for one-on-one games all summer. Pritchard lost, again and again. That surprised no one except Pritchard.
“It just destroyed me,” he says. “Every day.”
He made it his mission to beat Blake by the end of the summer. “Delusional, right?” says Brian Scalabrine, who became Boston’s most beloved benchwarmer in the early 2000s and now works as the team’s TV analyst. “Thinking a 15-year-old kid is going to turn around and beat an NBA player.”
Pritchard never did beat him. But he always came back for more. When it came to basketball, his answer was always more.
Another day in high school, Pritchard arrived at Viuhkola’s practice with his hands bandaged. His father, Terry, had found a pair of weighted balls to help Pritchard sharpen his ball-handling. Pritchard dribbled them so much, for so long, that they rubbed his skin raw.
If he wasn’t bleeding, literally or figuratively, he wasn’t trying. Or at least, he wasn’t trying hard enough.
Comfort became its own kind of discomfort.
His high school teammate Brooks DeBisschop once saw 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 period was a good chance to squeeze in some plyometrics. Pritchard already went to early-bird practices and after-school practices, so he met Terry at the high school track during the only free time he had left. His reasoning was that he had read Russell Westbrook made a huge leap between his sophomore and junior years, and he needed to sharpen his athleticism to do the same.
Pritchard insists there is a straight line from those battles with Blake, to the in-class hip stretches, to the lunchtime plyometrics, to his current obsession with one-on-one. He is the NBA’s maddest scientist, and those one-on-one sessions are his microscope. They let him 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 Embiid’s chest, and Embiid flew back 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.”
It can look as if Pritchard is defying the basic principles of physics by bodying Embiid. He isn’t. It’s sleight of hand, or really, 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, speed or direction against them.”
Pritchard has tested that skill thousands of times, perhaps tens of thousands, he estimates. He has done it against European pros, semipros and players who are professional practice partners. They defend him, give him looks and go again and again, harder and harder, until the lesson settles into his muscles.
There is something about a humid gym, and 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’s illogical. A 6-foot-1 guard, soaking wet, lives in the paint and elbows his way into elite company. Last season, 57 players attempted at least 200 shots in the key, the nonrestricted area. Pritchard ranked third in shooting percentage there, at 56%, behind Jokic and Kevin Durant.
This guard, who rarely gets the starting nod, almost always gets the nod at the end of possessions. He made 86 field goals with four or fewer seconds left on the shot clock in 2025-26, 12 more than Durant, his closest competitor. His 51.6% effective field goal percentage on those shots was second only to Jalen Brunson’s 51.7% among players with at least 100 attempts.
This undersized rim threat gets to the basket with power rather than speed. The only fitting question is, “Huh?”
“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.”
In other words, Pritchard is neither magician nor miracle. He is a zealot, Scalabrine says. He commits to those hours of one-on-one in the offseason. He does it during the season, too. After Celtics practice, he turns into a hawker, desperate to find anyone willing to play him one-on-one.
“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, after a lift, already thinking about lunch. An assistant coach called him back with an assignment: Go guard Payton.
Tonje was excited. This is going to be great, he thought.
Then Pritchard made 17 shots in a row.
“The dude did not miss,” Tonje says. “It was embarrassing.”
Nana Foulland, one of the Celtics’ player enhancement coaches, counted off Pritchard’s consecutive makes. Tonje pressured up, and Pritchard got an angle and went past him. One! Tonje cut off his path, but Pritchard was already on to the second counter, then pulled up for a contested fadeaway. Two!
Head coach Joe Mazzulla joined Foulland to watch. He folded his arms, which for Mazzulla signals excitement, and took in the action from half court as Pritchard kept dismantling Tonje.
At some point, Tonje accepted his fate. Unless he blocked a 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.”
Built for the next step
Back at the Cape Cod high school, Pritchard’s shirt, light gray 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, and studies Brunson film. They are conducting a forensic analysis to determine how the 6-foot-2 Brunson became one of the best in the world at drawing fouls.
Brunson just won NBA Finals MVP, so plenty of players want to be more like him. Pritchard, diminutive, crafty, isolation-dominant and now without Brown, might be uniquely positioned to make a run at being the next Brunson, or at least the next Brunson-adjacent player.
“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.”
Boston needs that breakout, or that continuation, because someone will have to help Tatum fill the Brown-shaped hole. Paul George has joined the team at 36 and is on the offensive downslope. Even if the scoring load is shared by committee, Pritchard will likely be its de facto chair.
Early returns this season have been modest. Still, people in and around the Celtics are bullish on Pritchard’s ability to take on that role. “I think he’s going to average, like, over 22 points a game,” Scalabrine says. The rest of the league seems to agree. In this year’s NBA general manager survey, released on the eve of the 2026-27 season, the top breakout candidates included a slew of recent top-10 picks entering 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 signals 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?”
It’s never a bad time to tap into your inner Jalen Brunson. For Pritchard and the Celtics, now is the right time. Boston isn’t looking for someone to become a world-beating No. 1 option, because it already has one in Tatum. That’s a good thing, because even Brunson-adjacent is a heavy lift.
Pritchard loves a doubter. 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 made the book simply by suggesting Pritchard look at some Ivy League programs during recruiting.
Even now, Pritchard still needles one scout. During the draft process, that scout texted one of Pritchard’s college coaches a bleak assessment: “Don’t think he’s gonna be an NBA player. Maybe a good overseas player, at best.” The scout compared him to a player named Kevin Pangos. Pritchard has no quarrel with Pangos, the former Gonzaga standout and two-time All-EuroLeague honoree. He says he was chasing something bigger.
So there are people who doubt Pritchard can get there. Good. If nobody had declared it a fool’s errand to chase something bigger, even something like 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.”
A menace, and a cornerstone
On the last day of September, with the Celtics two days into training camp, Pritchard and Mazzulla meet in 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 all 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’s more, he likes to count on him.
“I’ll always bet on Payton,” Mazzulla says.
It wasn’t always this wholesome. When Mazzulla was still an assistant with the Celtics, he loved to get his hands dirty and play 5-on-5. One day he ended up on the court with Pritchard. The scrimmage got 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. But his primal need to outwork, outlast and even outlive everyone was both his greatest feature and his biggest flaw.
One of Pritchard’s former graduate assistants at Oregon, Zack Gonzales, 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 essentially telling Pritchard he was repeating history. Pritchard had such tunnel vision about outdoing everyone that he forgot to bring anyone along with him.
Age, experience and a later letter from Mazzulla offering an olive branch have softened those sharp edges. Pritchard has a gentler touch these days. He had hoped to host the newest Celtics at his Cape Cod workout bootcamp, though the timing didn’t work out. 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, early in training camp. “He’s an absolute crazy person when it comes to trying to improve his game.”
He is a menace because that is what got him here, to all the versions of Payton Pritchard: the bench star who is sometimes a starter; the heave god; the league’s most unexpected isolation god; and the new owner of a $44.2 million, two-year extension that will keep him a Celtic through 2030. He is a cornerstone of what comes next.
“I can’t wake up,” he says, “and be Wemby.”