How Payton Pritchard became Boston's unlikely iso king

PAYTON PRITCHARD IS at the Celtics bench when he feels a tap on his shoulder. It's late April, and time is running out in Game 3 of the first round of the playoffs. Boston has padded its lead to 103-98 with just over a minute to go, and a win on the road in Philadelphia is in sight. That's what the Celtics usually do, after all: beat the Sixers in the playoffs, every time they've met in the postseason in the past 44 years. Pritchard has rained 3s tonight, five in all, to help with their latest effort, so who knows what kind of Philly-cooked hospitality awaits Pritchard right now. He turns to find a man even shorter than he is -- a rarity for Pritchard on NBA courts -- who is swathed in all black. Black leather jacket, black T-shirt, black baseball cap. It all provides a stark canvas for the man's necklace, a blinged-out Roman numeral III, that glints when it hits the arena lights just right, and -- "Oh, s---," Pritchard thinks. "That's ..." Allen Iverson looks at Pritchard, Pritchard remembers, and says: "You're the coldest white boy I've ever seen." A CASE STUDY in being cold: Nobody in the league had a better effective field goal percentage on isolation plays than Pritchard last season (58.6%). Not Nikola Jokic (57.1%), nor Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (56.4%), nor Luka Doncic (55.8%). At the midpoint of the 2025-26 season, he was averaging 1.30 points per iso possession (minimum 100 possessions), according to Stat Defender, and had he kept up that pace, it would've been the highest mark for any player in the past decade. Pritchard trailed off in the second half of the season, but according to NBA.com, his 1.11 PPP for the season was still third highest in the league, placing him behind Doncic and SGA. He is the NBA's unlikeliest iso king. And so it only makes sense that in the presence of Iverson, patron saint of undersized iso kings, Pritchard's most urgent thought is this: "That's AI." And his second-most urgent thought: "I gotta turn up. Now I gotta go crazy." The Celtics have been toying with the Sixers' emotions in the fourth quarter, letting them get close late -- down by three points, then one, then two. At which point, with a little more than a minute left, Pritchard decides to break some spirits. "HE'S A KILLER," play-by-play man Eric Collins screams on the broadcast, fittingly, as Pritchard sinks a step-back 26-footer right as the buzzer sounds. Pritchard saves most of his fireworks for Game 4, though, two days later. He nails a one-legged, buzzer-beating 3 at the end of the first quarter; carries Boston in the first half -- he scores 18 points to the starting five's combined 24; and finishes the night with a game and playoff career-high 32. Pritchard does all this from the bench because that's what he is: a bench player. In fact, he's the gold standard for bench players, two seasons removed from being crowned Sixth Man of the Year. Actually, he's a starter in this league, or at least can be, like he was last season for 50 games, after Jrue Holiday departed for Portland and Jayson Tatum obliterated his Achilles. Then again, he's the gimmick guy (those half-court heaves) and/or the fundamentals guy (those viral handles) and/or the guy who simply rose above his station (that late first-round draft nod), who has never looked the part of NBA player. Let alone star -- or sometimes starter -- for one of the league's heavyweights. "He's 6-1 soaking wet," says Celtics assistant coach Sam Cassell, which isn't quite right and is also, somehow, exactly right. If this countercultural iso star is a killer, he's a trained one. For years, Pritchard has held borderline-unhinged offseason workouts that, to those close to him, bring to mind some of the biggest one-name guard icons in the history of the sport. They happen in anonymous gyms, and they're against only those who dare to meet him -- and defend him -- at his level. The Celtics will need every bit of them. And him. Boston leaned on Pritchard's services plenty in the before-times. Before last postseason spiraled into disaster, when the Celtics parlayed a 3-1 series lead over Philly into a nausea-inducing Game 7 loss. Before they sent Jaylen Brown packing in the offseason to -- of all places -- Philadelphia. But now, if the Celtics hope to reclaim their spot atop an Eastern Conference that has grown only more cutthroat, they'll need Pritchard to be even colder. "THERE'S JUST SOMETHING about a humid gym," Pritchard says. It's 6:45 in the morning in the middle of June, and Pritchard has just walked into the humid gym of his choice, at a high school on the southeastern tip of Cape Cod. He'd pulled up to school grounds 10 minutes earlier but had to wait outside while his trainer, Michael Soares, phoned a staffer to open the locked double doors. This gym, like most of the unglamorous gyms Pritchard handpicks for his offseason workouts, doesn't boast amenities such as air-conditioning. A few years ago, a heat wave slammed West Linn, Oregon, where he grew up. Outside, temperatures ticked up to 115 degrees, and it grew only more tropical indoors, hitting 120 in the gym at his high school alma mater, where he was conducting workouts. Pritchard came armed with extra towels because even the ball was sweating that day. The conditions in his Cape Cod accommodations are temperate by comparison. And anyway, Pritchard likes the muck. The muck is why he has been recruiting Division II and III basketball players, international guys and hometown buddies to high school gyms for years now. They're not exactly a ragtag motley crew, but they're not polished professionals either, and Pritchard figures that makes them hungry. He'll pay for their gas to drive down from Boston to the Cape, or their flights to cross the country or an ocean, because they can be counted on to play feisty, relentless one-on-one defense. Today, as ever, it's death by repetition for Pritchard. Bump his defender, create space, shoot. Beat his defender, get to his spot, shoot. React to his defender chasing him. Drive to the basket because his 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 defenders for the summer, is the one chasing Pritchard. He's feeling himself, certain that he has forced Pritchard into a bad angle. But Saintilus runs past the basket, so he doesn't get to see Pritchard attempt an awkward layup. Still, Saintilus knows. He shouts over -- to Soares, or maybe to the basketball gods for forsaking him and his defense -- "Did that really go in?" It did. And so it goes for close to two hours about three times a week throughout the summer. Pritchard will do 150 possessions in his elaborate dance around the basketball court -- the block, the elbow, the other elbow, the 3-point line, the corner, the wing, the high slot, the middle, the opposite slot -- going one-on-one versus a rotating cast of defenders. They'll get breaks, he won't, and if Pritchard shoots under 60% on the day, his defenders eat like kings at Chipotle and then send him the bill. He considers it a small price to pay for the thousands of live looks he gets over the summer, for the chance to square up against one man and try to best him. And then do it again and again, filing it all away in his mental archive. How much basketball data mining is too much? The limit does not exist. "My approach is probably a little different," he concedes. The approach is, in fact, Kyrie Irving-esque if you ask Dave Lewin, the Celtics' assistant GM. Lewin spent the early part of his career in Cleveland, in Irving's orbit, and if Lewin ever walked into the facility at night, there was a good chance Irving was there too, playing one-on-one. "They're obviously different," he 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. Back in high school, he would train at ClubSport, a gym near West Linn. He was never a physical marvel -- "unassuming-looking," his old high school coach, Eric Viuhkola, says with a gentle touch. "It wasn't like LeBron James coming through the gym." Still, he caught the eye of another local gymgoer. Steve Blake was nearing the end of his 13-year journeyman NBA career, but he struck up a kinship with the teenager. For the entire summer before Pritchard's sophomore year, Blake would pick him up -- three times a week, sometimes four -- to go one-on-one. Pritchard got beat. And beat and beat, which came as a surprise to precisely no one except Pritchard. "It just destroyed me," he says. "Every day." He made it his life's mission to get the best of 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 serves as the team's TV analyst. "Thinking a 15-year-old kid is going to turn round and beat an NBA player.") Pritchard never did, but he also always chose to come back for more. Because his answer, at least when it came to basketball, was always more. There was another day, also in high school, when Pritchard showed up to Viuhkola's practice with his hands bandaged. His father, Terry, had procured a pair of weighted balls for Pritchard to fine-tune his ballhandling skills. Pritchard dribbled them so much, for so long, they rubbed his skin raw. If he wasn't bleeding -- literally, figuratively -- he wasn't trying. Or at least not trying hard enough, he thought. Comfort became its own brand of discomfort. His high school teammate Brooks DeBisschop noticed Pritchard contorting his body at his desk in class one day. Pritchard explained it was a good chance to work on his hip mobility. Just like his lunch period was a good chance to squeeze in some plyometrics. Pritchard already attended early-bird practices and after-school practices, so he met up with Terry at the high school track during the only free time he had left. Pritchard's justification was that he had read that Russell Westbrook took a huge leap between his sophomore and junior years, and he just needed to hone his athleticism to do the same. There is, Pritchard insists, a straight line from those battles with Blake, and those in-class hip stretches, and those lunchtime plyometric workouts, to his current obsession with one-on-ones. He's the NBA's maddest scientist, and those one-on-ones are a microscope. A chance to put his game under the lens and observe it at an atomic level. In Game 5 of last season's series against the Sixers, early in the second quarter, Pritchard drove hard to the basket then veer stepped Joel Embiid. Eleven inches taller and 75 pounds heavier Joel Embiid. Pritchard put his shoulder into the center, and Embiid flew back a good 5 or 6 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." Pritchard is strong, but if it seems odd that he's out here defying the basic principles of physics by bodying Embiid, well, that's because he's not actually skirting science. It's just 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." Because he has tested it thousands of times, maybe double-digit thousands, Pritchard estimates. Against European pros and semipros and guys who are professional practicers. They defend him, give him looks, go again and again and more and more and harder and harder, until that memory has settled into his muscles. Because there is something about a humid gym, and he'll always return to that lab. "HE'S AN ABSOLUTE outlier for what he does," Scalabrine says. Which explains why there's a fever dream-like quality to the Pritchard basketball experience. It's illogical. Here's this 6-1 -- ahem, soaking wet -- guy who lives in the paint, then elbows his way into elite company. Last season, there were 57 players who attempted at least 200 shots in the key (nonrestricted area), and among them, Pritchard ranked third with 56% shooting, after Jokic and Kevin Durant. This guard who doesn't usually get 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. And his 51.6% effective field goal percentage on these shots was second only to Jalen Brunson's 51.7% among players to log at least 100 attempts, according to ESPN Research. This undersized rim threat gets to the basket with power instead of speed, and the only appropriate 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's just sort of a zealot, Scalabrine says. In the offseason, when he commits to playing all those hours of one-on-one. In the season, too: The man turns into a hawker after Celtics practice -- desperate to sell any takers on playing him -- surprise -- 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, John Tonje was headed out of the Auerbach Center, the Celtics' training facility, having just finished a lift and already mentally moving on to lunch. Then an assistant coach called him back inside with some marching orders: Come guard Payton. Tonje, then a rookie, was jazzed to be called to duty. Oh, 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, started to count off Pritchard's consecutive shots. Tonje would pressure up, then Pritchard would get an angle and go past him. One! Tonje would cut Pritchard off, but Pritchard was already off to his second counter, then pulling up for a contested fadeaway. Two! Boston head coach Joe Mazzulla joined Foulland at the watch party. He folded his arms, which for Mazzulla, counted for excitement, taking in the action from half court as Pritchard went about his dismantling. Three! At some point, Tonje accepted his fate. Unless he blocked Pritchard or stole the ball, he understood Pritchard's shot was going in. Seven! Eleven! Seventeen! "That was my welcome to the league moment," Tonje says. "There was just no missing." BACK AT THE high school in Cape Cod, Pritchard's shirt, which was light gray when he arrived just after dawn, is nearly black with sweat within the hour. He's taking a rare breather, but not a break. Now he's hunched over a laptop with another one of his trainers, Rocky DeAndrade, poring over Brunson film, a forensic analysis underway to ascertain how the 6-foot-2 Brunson became one of the best in the world at drawing fouls. Brunson is fresh off an NBA Finals MVP, so plenty of people want to be more like him. But Pritchard -- diminutive, crafty, iso-dominant and newly Jaylen Brown-less -- might be uniquely situated to make a run at being 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 perceived breakout or continuation of the things, because someone, or someones, will have to pitch in to help Tatum fill the Brown-shaped hole in Boston. Paul George has entered the fold at 36 and on the offensive downslope, so even if the pitching in is done by committee, odds are good Pritchard will have to be the de facto committee chair. Though this season's (very) early returns have been modest, those in and around the Celtics are bullish on Pritchard's ability to do just that -- "I think he's going to average, like, over 22 points a game," Scalabrine says -- and so, it seems, is the rest of the league. In this year's NBA GM survey, released on the eve of the 2026-27 season, the top candidates for breakout players featured, predictably, a slew of recent top-10 picks on the cusp of their sophomore seasons: Dylan Harper, Cooper Flagg, Collin Murray-Boyles. Also a vote-getter: Pritchard, former top-26 pick, now entering Year 7. These are all reassuring 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?" So, sure, it's never a bad time to tap into your inner Jalen Brunson. It's just that, for Pritchard, for the Celtics, now is the perfect time. And it's not like the Celtics are looking for someone to morph into a world-beating No. 1 option. They already have that in Tatum. Good thing, because even Brunson-adjacent is a heavy lift. One thing about Pritchard is, he loves a doubter. Back in high school, he had a burn book cataloguing his long list of detractors and demerits: too short, too unathletic, too slow, too bad, so sad. His own father earned a spot in the book just by virtue of suggesting Pritchard give some Ivy League programs a look during his high school recruiting days. Even now, there's a scout whom Pritchard still needles because that scout 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, he wrote. Maybe a good overseas player, at best a kid named Kevin Pangos. No shade to Kevin Pangos, former Gonzaga standout and two-time All-EuroLeague honoree, Pritchard says, but he was chasing something bigger. So there are people out there who don't think Pritchard has it in him? Good. Great, even, because if there wasn't somebody who declared it a fool's errand for him to chase something bigger, to chase even the likes of Brunson, he'd find 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. "Or sometimes you just make it up." ON THE LAST day of September, with the Celtics two days into training camp, Pritchard and Mazzulla convene in a two-man huddle on the team's practice court. There's a good deal of hand waving, and at one point, Mazzulla sort of elbows Pritchard, perhaps the better to demonstrate the play they seem to be hashing out. It all looks very serious because Mazzulla is famously Very Serious, but then something startling happens. Mazzulla breaks character, then breaks out in a bona fide 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. Back when Mazzulla was still an assistant with the Celtics, he loved to get his hands dirty and play 5-on-5, and one day he wound up playing with Pritchard. The scrimmage got testy, and Mazzulla got frank. You don't make people better, he barked at Pritchard. Pritchard bristled. All he had ever done was work himself ragged. But it was this, his primal need to outwork, to outlast, to outlive, even, that wound up being both feature and bug. One of Pritchard's old 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," he says. "He was like, 'I'm gonna kill him.'" So there was Mazzulla trying to tell Pritchard that he was repeating history. He had such tunnel vision to out-everything everyone else that he forgot to bring everyone else along with him. Age and experience -- and a letter later on from Mazzulla to offer an olive branch -- will blunt those sharp edges. Pritchard has a softer touch these days. The timing didn't pan out, but he had hoped to host the newest Celtics in Cape Cod at his workout bootcamp. And he's a little less inclined to kill, though John Tonje would like a word. What can he say? He works how he works. "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." He's a menace because that's what got him here, to all these different versions of Payton Pritchard: The bench star and sometimes starter; the heave god and the league's most unexpected iso god; the new owner of a $44.2 million, two-year extension that will make him a Celtic as far out as 2030. And a cornerstone of what comes next. He's a menace because he has to be. "I can't wake up," he says, "and be Wemby."