Payton Pritchard has become the NBA’s most unlikely isolation star, and the Boston Celtics need him to get even better. Pritchard, a bench player who has spent most of his career coming off the bench, produced the league’s most efficient isolation scoring last season, and he now faces a bigger role after Jaylen Brown was traded to Philadelphia.
Pritchard’s breakout moment came in the first round of the 2026 playoffs. In Game 4 against the Sixers, he nailed a one-legged, buzzer-beating 3 at the end of the first quarter, carried Boston through the first half while scoring 18 points to the starting five’s combined 24, and finished with a game and playoff career-high 32 points.
Earlier in Game 3, with Boston up 103-98 and just over a minute left, Pritchard sank a step-back 26-footer as the buzzer sounded. Play-by-play announcer Eric Collins called it out on the broadcast: “HE’S A KILLER.” Pritchard had five 3-pointers in that game alone.
Pritchard was still in the moment when Allen Iverson walked up to him during that Game 3 stretch. Pritchard recalled that Iverson looked at him and said, “You’re the coldest white boy I’ve ever seen.”
An isolation star from the bench
Pritchard was the most efficient isolation scorer in the league last season. His 58.6% effective field goal percentage on isolation plays topped Nikola Jokic (57.1%), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (56.4%) and Luka Doncic (55.8%). At the midpoint of the 2025-26 season, he averaged 1.30 points per isolation possession among players with at least 100 possessions, according to Stat Defender, a pace that would have been the highest for any player in the past decade. He cooled in the second half, but his 1.11 points per possession for the full season, per NBA.com, still ranked third in the league behind Doncic and Gilgeous-Alexander.
Pritchard also excels in the paint. Last season, among 57 players who attempted at least 200 shots in the key (nonrestricted area), he ranked third with 56% shooting, trailing only Jokic and Kevin Durant. He made 86 field goals with four or fewer seconds left on the shot clock, 12 more than Durant, who was second. His 51.6% effective field goal percentage on those shots trailed only Jalen Brunson’s 51.7% among players with at least 100 attempts, according to ESPN Research.
Pritchard’s résumé is built on the bench. He won Sixth Man of the Year two seasons ago. He also started 50 games last season after Jrue Holiday left for Portland and Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles. Still, he has never fully shed the label of a role player, even as he has produced like a star for one of the league’s top teams.
“He’s 6-1 soaking wet,” Celtics assistant coach Sam Cassell says.
Relentless summers in humid gyms
Pritchard’s approach to his craft is unusual. For years, he has run offseason workouts in unglamorous gyms, often with Division II and III players, international players and hometown friends who are hungry to earn their spot against him. He pays for their gas or flights because, he says, they play feisty, relentless one-on-one defense.
In June, Pritchard arrived at a high school on the southeastern tip of Cape Cod at 6:45 a.m., waiting outside until his trainer, Michael Soares, got staff to open the locked doors. The gym had no air-conditioning, which Pritchard prefers. “There’s just something about a humid gym,” he says. He grew up in West Linn, Oregon, where a heat wave once pushed the temperature in his high school gym to 120 degrees. He brought extra towels that day because even the ball was sweating.
Each session runs close to two hours, about three times a week through the summer. Pritchard works through roughly 150 possessions, moving across the block, the elbow, the 3-point line, the corner, the wing and the high slot while a rotating cast of defenders guards him. The defenders get breaks; he does not. If Pritchard shoots under 60% for the day, his defenders eat at Chipotle and send him the bill.
Dave Lewin, the Celtics’ assistant general manager, compares Pritchard’s approach to Kyrie Irving’s. Lewin spent his early career in Cleveland, where he often saw Irving playing one-on-one late 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.”
The obsession started early. In high school, Pritchard trained at ClubSport near West Linn. Former NBA guard Steve Blake, nearing the end of a 13-year career, took an interest in him and picked him up three or four times a week for one-on-one sessions the summer before Pritchard’s sophomore year. Pritchard lost again and again. “It just destroyed me,” he says. “Every day.” His goal became beating Blake by the end of that summer. He never did, but he kept coming back.
Other stories show the same intensity. At one point, Pritchard showed up to practice with bandaged hands after his father, Terry, bought him weighted balls to sharpen his handle. He dribbled them so long that they rubbed his skin raw. He also worked on hip mobility at his desk in class and squeezed in plyometrics during lunch. Pritchard said he read that Russell Westbrook made a huge leap between his sophomore and junior years, and he wanted to build his athleticism to do the same.
Pritchard sees one-on-one work as a microscope for his game. In Game 5 of last season’s series against Philadelphia, he drove past Joel Embiid, who is 11 inches taller and 75 pounds heavier, and put his shoulder into the center. Embiid flew back five or six feet. “He’s knocking Joel Embiid off his spot to get a layup,” Brian Scalabrine says. Soares describes the technique this way: “He truly knows when to utilize his opponents’ inertia or speed or direction against them.”
A teammate’s first lesson
Last season, rookie John Tonje was called back inside the Auerbach Center to guard Pritchard during a workout. Pritchard then made 17 shots in a row. “The dude did not miss,” Tonje says. “It was embarrassing.” Nana Foulland, a Celtics player enhancement coach, counted off each make while head coach Joe Mazzulla watched from half court with his arms folded. “That was my welcome to the league moment,” Tonje says. “There was just no missing.”
Pritchard keeps working between sessions, too. In the Cape Cod gym, he studied Brunson film with trainer Rocky DeAndrade, trying to understand how the 6-foot-2 Brunson became one of the best in the league at drawing fouls. Brunson just earned NBA Finals MVP honors. Lewin believes Pritchard could make his own run at that level. “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.”
The Celtics need that continuation. Paul George, who is 36, has joined the team, but Pritchard will likely take on much of the scoring load alongside Tatum. Scalabrine predicts Pritchard will average more than 22 points per game this season. In the NBA’s annual GM survey, released on the eve of the 2026-27 season, Pritchard received votes as a breakout candidate, a former top-26 pick now entering his seventh season.
Mazzulla says the team has asked more from him every year. “He has the ability to take on whatever the team needs at that particular time, you know?” Mazzulla says. “I’ll always bet on Payton.”
From doubters to a new contract
Pritchard has long used doubt as motivation. In high school, he kept a list of detractors and their complaints, calling himself too short, too unathletic, too slow. His own father once suggested he consider some Ivy League programs, and that made the list too. Pritchard still remembers a scout who texted one of his college coaches during the draft process, predicting that he would not make the NBA and might become a good overseas player at best, like former Gonzaga standout Kevin Pangos. “There’s always doubters,” Pritchard says. “There’s always the next step that people think you can’t get to. So you search for that and you find it.”
His relationship with Mazzulla has grown warmer. Years ago, when Mazzulla was still an assistant, a testy 5-on-5 game got heated, and Mazzulla told Pritchard, “You don’t make people better.” Pritchard bristled, because he had always pushed himself hard. Zack Gonzales, one of Pritchard’s former graduate assistants at Oregon, recalls that Pritchard once tried to break a freshman guard by pushing him relentlessly. “Payton’s goal every day was to make him cry,” Gonzales says. Pritchard has softened with age, and he has said he would like to host the newest Celtics at his Cape Cod workout camp.
Mike Conley, who joined Boston this season, offered his own take. “A menace,” Conley said. “He’s an absolute crazy person when it comes to trying to improve his game.”
Pritchard recently signed a two-year extension worth $44.2 million that will keep him in Boston through 2030. The Celtics now count on him to be a cornerstone for what comes next. Pritchard has a simple response to the pressure of that role. “I can’t wake up,” he says, “and be Wemby.”