Payton Pritchard is the NBA’s unlikeliest isolation star. Last season, no player in the league scored more efficiently on isolation plays, with an effective field goal percentage of 58.6%. The Boston Celtics guard came off the bench for most of his games, but he now faces a bigger role after Jaylen Brown’s departure and a $44.2 million, two-year extension that keeps him in Boston through 2030.
Pritchard’s start to the 2026-27 season has been modest so far, but people around the club expect more. “I think he’s going to average, like, over 22 points a game,” says Celtics assistant coach Sam Cassell’s colleague Brian Scalabrine, who now works as the team’s TV analyst.
A bench player with a killer instinct
Pritchard was at the Celtics bench in late April when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Boston led Philadelphia 103-98 in Game 3 of the first-round playoff series with just over a minute to play. He turned to find Allen Iverson, a man even shorter than Pritchard, dressed head to toe in black, with a blinged-out Roman numeral III hanging from his neck.
Iverson looked at Pritchard and said: “You’re the coldest white boy I’ve ever seen.”
Pritchard’s first thought was that he was looking at Iverson. His second was that he needed to turn up the intensity. Moments later, with the Celtics protecting a narrow lead, he sank a step-back 26-footer as the buzzer sounded. Play-by-play man Eric Collins called it on the broadcast: “He’s a killer.”
Pritchard saved his biggest night for Game 4, two days later. He hit a one-legged, buzzer-beating three at the end of the first quarter, carried Boston through the first half by scoring 18 points to the starting five’s combined 24, and finished with 32 points. It was a career high in both regular-season and playoff games.
Pritchard does most of this work from the bench, which is exactly what he is. He was crowned 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 ruptured his Achilles. Even so, he has never fully shed the labels that follow him: the gimmick guy known for half-court heaves, the fundamentals guy with the viral handles, and the late first-round pick who rose above his station.
“He’s 6-1 soaking wet,” Cassell says. The description is not quite accurate, yet somehow it is exactly right.
The numbers behind the iso king
The isolation numbers are striking. At the midpoint of the 2025-26 season, Pritchard averaged 1.30 points per isolation possession, according to Stat Defender, among players with at least 100 possessions. If he had kept that pace, it would have been the highest mark for any player in the past decade. He cooled in the second half, but his full-season mark of 1.11 points per possession, per NBA.com, still ranked third in the league behind Luka Doncic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
His finishing around the rim is just as notable. Among 57 players who attempted at least 200 shots in the non-restricted area last season, Pritchard ranked third with 56% shooting, behind Nikola Jokic and Kevin Durant. He also made 86 field goals with four or fewer seconds left on the shot clock, 12 more than Durant. 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, according to ESPN Research.
Pritchard is not a physical outlier. He gets to the basket with power rather than speed, and he has learned how to use his opponents’ momentum against them. “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.”
Summers in the humid gym
For years, Pritchard has run offseason workouts that resemble a laboratory experiment. He chooses unglamorous gyms, often without air conditioning, and invites Division II and III players, international prospects and hometown friends to defend him one-on-one. He pays their gas to drive down from Boston or covers their flights across the country or an ocean. In return, he gets relentless, feisty defence.
One recent morning, Pritchard walked into a high school gym on the southeastern tip of Cape Cod at 6:45 a.m. He had to wait outside while his trainer, Michael Soares, phoned a staffer to unlock the doors. “There’s just something about a humid gym,” Pritchard says.
Heat is nothing new to him. A few years ago, temperatures in West Linn, Oregon, where he grew up, reached 115 degrees outside. Inside his old high school gym, it hit 120. Pritchard brought extra towels because even the ball was sweating.
The routine is simple and exhausting. Pritchard works through a set of spots on the court, from the block and the elbow to the corners and the wing, and he shoots, drives and reacts to defenders who chase him. Each session can include around 150 possessions over nearly two hours, about three times a week through the summer. His defenders get regular breaks, and he does not. If Pritchard shoots under 60% on a given day, his defenders get a free meal at Chipotle, and he gets the bill.
Bruce Saintilus, recently of Division III Clark University, was one of his defenders this summer. At one point, he was certain he had forced Pritchard into a bad angle. Then Pritchard made an awkward layup that Saintilus did not see. “Did that really go in?” Saintilus shouted.
Dave Lewin, the Celtics’ assistant general manager, compares Pritchard’s approach to Kyrie Irving’s. Lewin spent the early part of his career in Cleveland, where he often saw Irving playing one-on-one at night. “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, and was never a physical standout. His old coach, Eric Viuhkola, describes him as “unassuming-looking.” “It wasn’t like LeBron James coming through the gym,” Viuhkola says.
Steve Blake, nearing the end of a 13-year NBA career, noticed 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. “It just destroyed me,” he says. “Every day.”
He set himself a goal of beating Blake by the end of the summer. Scalabrine laughs at the idea. “Thinking a 15-year-old kid is going to turn round and beat an NBA player,” he says. Pritchard never managed it, but he kept coming back. “His answer, at least when it came to basketball, was always more.”
That drive showed up in other ways too. One day, Pritchard arrived at practice with bandaged hands. His father, Terry, had bought a pair of weighted balls to sharpen his ballhandling, and Pritchard dribbled them so long that they rubbed his skin raw. Even in class, he worked on his hip mobility by contorting his body at his desk. During lunch, he snuck in plyometrics at the high school track with his father. He had read that Russell Westbrook made a huge leap between his sophomore and junior years, and he wanted to do the same.
Pritchard sees a straight line from those summer battles to his current work. The one-on-one sessions act as a microscope, letting him study his game at a very fine level.
Sleight of body
In Game 5 of last season’s series against Philadelphia, Pritchard drove to the basket and veer-stepped past Joel Embiid, who stands 11 inches taller and weighs 75 pounds more. Pritchard put his shoulder into the centre, and Embiid stumbled 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.”
Soares says the trick is not raw strength. “People always say Payton might be one of the strongest pound-for-pound players,” he says. “But really, he just knows how to use other players’ bodies against them.”
Pritchard estimates he has tested that skill thousands of times, perhaps tens of thousands. He has done it against European pros, semi-pros and players who specialise in practice. Eventually the lessons settle into his muscles.
Learning to lead
John Tonje, then a rookie, learned how relentless Pritchard could be last season. Tonje was leaving the Auerbach Center after a lift when an assistant coach called him back to guard Pritchard. Pritchard then made 17 shots in a row. Nana Foulland, one of the Celtics’ player enhancement coaches, counted them off as Pritchard beat Tonje’s pressure, pulled up for contested fadeaways and kept scoring. Head coach Joe Mazzulla watched from half court with his arms folded, which for him counts as excitement.
“The dude did not miss,” Tonje says. “It was embarrassing. That was my welcome to the league moment.”
Pritchard’s intensity has not always been easy for teammates. During a scrimmage when Mazzulla was still an assistant, the play turned testy. “You don’t make people better,” Mazzulla barked at him. Pritchard bristled, because all he had ever done was work himself ragged. His drive to outwork and outlast everyone was both his greatest strength and his biggest flaw.
Zack Gonzales, one of Pritchard’s former graduate assistants at Oregon, recalls Pritchard pushing a freshman guard to his limit. “Payton’s goal every day was to make him cry,” Gonzales says. “He was like, ‘I’m gonna kill him.'”
Age and experience have softened those edges. Mazzulla later sent Pritchard a letter offering an olive branch, and Pritchard now has a softer touch. He had hoped to host the newer Celtics at his Cape Cod bootcamp, though the timing did not work out. “A menace,” Mike Conley says of him. “He’s an absolute crazy person when it comes to trying to improve his game.”
Mazzulla now places his trust in Pritchard. At the start of training camp, the two men huddled on the practice court, and Mazzulla broke into a rare smile. “I’ll always bet on Payton,” Mazzulla says.
Proving the doubters wrong
Pritchard has always had doubters, and he has kept a mental list of them. In high school, he heard he was too short, too unathletic, too slow. His own father once suggested he consider Ivy League programmes. A scout who texted one of Pritchard’s college coaches during the draft process wrote that Pritchard would not make the NBA and might be a good overseas player at best. Pritchard still needles that scout about it.
“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.”
The Celtics need him to find it now. With Brown gone and Tatum leading the team, someone must fill the gap, and Paul George, at 36, is on the offensive downslope. Lewin expects the next step to look like a continuation rather than a sudden breakout. “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.”
Pritchard is already an early pick for breakout players in some circles. In this year’s NBA general manager survey, he appeared among a group that included several recent top-10 picks, despite entering his seventh season.
For now, Pritchard is focused on the next step. “I can’t wake up,” he says, “and be Wemby.”