Payton Pritchard is the NBA’s unlikeliest isolation star, and the Boston Celtics will need him to be even colder as they try to reclaim their place atop an Eastern Conference that has only grown more cutthroat.
Pritchard is at the Celtics bench late in Game 3 of the first-round playoff series in April when he feels a tap on his shoulder. Boston has padded its lead to 103-98 with just over a minute to go, and a road win in Philadelphia is in sight. The Celtics have beaten the Sixers every time they have met in the postseason in the past 44 years, and Pritchard has hit five 3-pointers to help build the lead.
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. The man wears a blinged-out Roman numeral III necklace that glints under the arena lights. It is Allen Iverson.
Iverson looks at Pritchard and says: “You’re the coldest white boy I’ve ever seen.”
A killer from the isolation
Pritchard’s credentials as a cold shooter are not in question. Nobody in the league had a better effective field goal percentage on isolation plays than Pritchard last season, at 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 kept that pace, it would have been the highest mark for any player in the past decade. He cooled in the second half of the season, but his 1.11 points per possession for the year still ranked third in the league according to NBA.com, 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 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 close the gap, first down by 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 as the buzzer sounds, and play-by-play man Eric Collins yells: “He’s a killer.”
Pritchard saves most of his fireworks 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 both regular-season and playoff games.
Pritchard does all of 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. He did so for 50 games last season, after Jrue Holiday left for Portland and Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles. Still, he has often been seen as a gimmick, with his half-court heaves, or a fundamentals guy, with his viral handles, or a player who rose above his station after being drafted late in the first round. He has never looked the part of an NBA star, let alone 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, and it is also, somehow, exactly right.
The humid gym
If Pritchard is a killer, he is a trained one. For years, he has held brutal offseason workouts that, to those close to him, bring to mind some of the biggest one-name guard legends in the sport’s history. They take place in anonymous gyms, and he works out only against those who dare to meet him, and defend him, at his level.
“There’s just something about a humid gym,” Pritchard says.
It is 6:45 a.m. in mid-June, and Pritchard has walked into the gym of his choice, a high school on the southeastern tip of Cape Cod. He arrived 10 minutes earlier but had to wait outside while his trainer, Michael Soares, phoned a staffer to open the locked double doors. The gym has no air-conditioning, like most of the unglamorous gyms Pritchard picks for his offseason work. A few years ago, a heat wave hit West Linn, Oregon, where he grew up. Outside, temperatures reached 115 degrees, and it was even hotter inside his old high school gym, which hit 120. Pritchard brought extra towels because even the ball was sweating that day.
Pritchard likes the muck. For years, he has recruited Division II and III players, international players and hometown friends to play with him in high school gyms. They are not polished professionals, and Pritchard believes that makes them hungry. He pays for their gas from Boston to the Cape, or their flights across the country or an ocean, because they play feisty, relentless one-on-one defense.
The routine is repetition. Bump the defender, create space, shoot. Beat the defender, get to his spot, shoot. React when the defender chases. Drive to the basket when the defender chases from too far behind.
About 30 minutes in, Bruce Saintilus, recently of Division III Clark University and one of Pritchard’s defenders this summer, is the one doing the chasing. He is sure he has forced Pritchard into a bad angle. But Saintilus runs past the basket and doesn’t see Pritchard attempt an awkward layup. He still knows. He shouts over to Soares, or possibly to the basketball gods, “Did that really go in?”
This goes on for close to two hours, about three times a week, all summer. Pritchard runs about 150 possessions in a 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 works one-on-one against a rotating cast of defenders. They get breaks, and he doesn’t. If Pritchard shoots under 60% on a given 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 man, try to beat him, then do it again and again. He files all of it away in his mental archive. “My approach is probably a little different,” he concedes.
Different is one word for it. Dave Lewin, the Celtics’ assistant general manager, says the approach is Kyrie Irving-esque. Lewin 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 started 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. “It wasn’t like LeBron James coming through the gym.”
Still, he caught the eye of a local gymgoer. Steve Blake was nearing the end of his 13-year NBA career when he struck up a kinship with the teenager. Before Pritchard’s sophomore year, Blake picked him up three or four times a week all summer to play one-on-one. Pritchard lost, again and again, which surprised no one except Pritchard.
“It just destroyed me,” he says. “Every day.”
He made it his life’s 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, but he kept coming back for more. When it came to basketball, his answer was always more.
Another day in high school, Pritchard showed up to Viuhkola’s practice with his hands bandaged. His father, Terry, had found a pair of weighted balls to help him sharpen his ballhandling. 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 hard enough, he thought. 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 period was a good chance to squeeze in plyometrics. He already attended early-morning and after-school practices, so he met Terry at the high school track during the only free time he had left. Pritchard had read that Russell Westbrook made a huge leap between his sophomore and junior years, and he figured he needed to sharpen his athleticism to do the same.
Pritchard insists there is a straight line from the battles with Blake, to the in-class hip stretches, to the lunchtime plyometrics, to his current obsession with one-on-one play. He sees the one-on-ones as a microscope, a chance to examine his game at an atomic level.
Sleight of body
In Game 5 of last season’s series against Philadelphia, 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 center, 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 physics by bodying Embiid. He isn’t. It is 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 utilize his opponents’ inertia or speed or direction against them.”
He has tested that skill thousands of times, perhaps tens of thousands, Pritchard estimates, against European pros, semipros and players who are professional practicers. They defend him, give him looks, and go again and again, harder and harder, until the lesson settles into his muscles.
“He’s an absolute outlier for what he does,” Scalabrine says. That explains the dreamlike quality of watching Pritchard play. He is a 6-1 guard 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 nonrestricted area. Pritchard ranked third in shooting percentage there, at 56%, behind Jokic and Kevin Durant.
He also seems to get the ball at the end of possessions, even though he usually comes off the bench. 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.
“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. “He is a savage, an absolute savage, when it comes to the way he works.”
Scalabrine describes Pritchard as a zealot. He keeps up the one-on-one work in the season, too. After Celtics practice, he hawks his services to anyone who will 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 inside with an assignment: guard Payton.
Tonje was excited. 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 the consecutive makes. Tonje pressured up, and Pritchard got an angle and went past him. One! Tonje cut him off, but Pritchard was already on to his 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 counts as excitement, and took in the action from half court.
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 a bigger role
Back in Cape Cod, Pritchard’s shirt, light gray when he arrived at dawn, is nearly black with sweat within an hour. He takes a rare breather, but not a break. He hunches over a laptop with another trainer, Rocky DeAndrade, studying Brunson film. They are trying to work out how the 6-foot-2 Brunson became one of the best in the world at drawing fouls.
Brunson was just named NBA Finals MVP, so many players want to be more like him. Pritchard, who is diminutive, crafty and iso-dominant, and who is now without Jaylen Brown, might be uniquely positioned to chase that path. Or at least to become 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 need someone to help Tatum fill the Brown-shaped hole in Boston. Paul George has joined the team at 36 and is on the offensive decline, so even if the load is shared by committee, Pritchard will likely have to be its de facto chair.
Early returns this season have been modest, but people around the Celtics are bullish. “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 GM survey, released on the eve of the 2026-27 season, the top breakout candidates included a slew of recent top-10 picks on the cusp of their sophomore seasons: Dylan Harper, Cooper Flagg and Collin Murray-Boyles. Pritchard, a former top-26 pick now entering his seventh season, also earned votes.
“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 is never a bad time to tap into your inner Brunson. For Pritchard and the Celtics, now is the perfect time. Boston isn’t looking for someone to become a No. 1 option, since it already has one in Tatum. Even so, being Brunson-adjacent is a heavy lift.
Pritchard also 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 earned a spot in it for suggesting that Pritchard look at some Ivy League programs during recruiting.
There is also a scout Pritchard still needles. That scout once texted one of Pritchard’s college coaches a bleak assessment during the draft process: he wouldn’t be an NBA player, maybe a good overseas player at best, like a player named Kevin Pangos. Pritchard has no quarrel with Pangos, a former Gonzaga standout and two-time All-EuroLeague honoree. He just was chasing something bigger.
There are plenty of people who don’t think Pritchard has it in him. That suits him fine. If nobody had called chasing something bigger a fool’s errand for him, he would have found those people 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.”
Mazzulla’s bet
On the last day of September, two days into Celtics training camp, Pritchard and Mazzulla huddle on the team’s practice court. There is a lot of hand waving, and at one point Mazzulla elbows Pritchard, perhaps to demonstrate the play they are working out.
It looks serious, because Mazzulla is famously very serious. Then he breaks character and breaks out in a real smile. Mazzulla likes Pritchard, and he likes to count on him.
“I’ll always bet on Payton,” Mazzulla says.
It was not always this friendly. When Mazzulla was still an assistant with the Celtics, he loved to play 5-on-5, and one day he wound 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 outlive others was both his greatest strength and a flaw.
Zack Gonzales, one of Pritchard’s former graduate assistants at Oregon, watched him 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 that he was repeating history. Pritchard’s tunnel vision to outdo everyone had made him forget to bring anyone else along.
Age, experience and a later letter from Mazzulla offering an olive branch have softened those edges. Pritchard has a gentler touch now. The timing didn’t work out, but he had hoped to host the newest Celtics at his Cape Cod workout bootcamp. He is also less inclined to be ruthless, though John Tonje might want a word.
“A menace,” says Mike Conley, who joined the Celtics this season. “He’s an absolute crazy person when it comes to trying to improve his game.”
That relentlessness is what got Pritchard here, to all of his different versions: the bench star and sometimes starter, the heave god and the league’s most unexpected iso god. He also just signed a two-year extension worth $44.2 million that will keep him in Boston as far out as 2030. He is a cornerstone of what comes next for the Celtics.
“I can’t wake up,” he says, “and be Wemby.”