Payton Pritchard, the Boston Celtics guard who comes off the bench, is the NBA’s unlikeliest isolation star, and he has built his game on relentless one-on-one work. During the 2025-26 season, his 1.11 points per isolation possession ranked third in the league, behind only Luka Doncic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
Pritchard is at the Celtics bench when he feels a tap on his shoulder. It is late April, and time is running out in Game 3 of the first-round playoff series. Boston has padded its lead to 103-98 with just over a minute to go, and a road win in Philadelphia is in sight. Pritchard has already hit five 3-pointers that night.
He turns to find a man even shorter than he is, a rarity for Pritchard on NBA courts. The man is dressed entirely in black: leather jacket, T-shirt and baseball cap. A blinged-out Roman numeral III hangs from his necklace and glints under the arena lights.
“Oh, s—,” Pritchard thinks. “That’s …”
Allen Iverson looks at Pritchard 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, 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 tailed off in the second half of the season, but his 1.11 points per possession for the full year still placed him third in the league, according to NBA.com.
He is the NBA’s unlikeliest iso king. So it makes sense that, in the presence of Iverson, the patron saint of undersized iso kings, Pritchard’s most urgent thought is: “That’s AI.”
His second most urgent thought is: “I gotta turn up. Now I gotta go crazy.”
The Celtics had been toying with the Sixers in the fourth quarter, letting them close the gap late in the game. With a little more than a minute left, Pritchard decided to break some spirits. Play-by-play man Eric Collins yelled, “HE’S A KILLER,” as Pritchard sank a step-back 26-footer just as the buzzer sounded.
Pritchard saved most of his fireworks for Game 4, two days later. He hit a one-legged, buzzer-beating 3 at the end of the first quarter. He carried Boston in the first half, scoring 18 points to the starting five’s combined 24. He finished the night with a game and playoff career-high 32 points.
Pritchard does all of this from the bench because that is his role. He is the gold standard for bench players and was crowned 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 viewed as a gimmick, either for his half-court heaves or his viral ball-handling, or as a player who simply rose above his station after a late first-round selection. He has never quite 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 isn’t quite right, and it is also, somehow, exactly right.
If this countercultural iso star is a killer, he is a trained one. For years, Pritchard has held offseason workouts that bring to mind some of the biggest one-name guard icons in the history of the sport. They take place in anonymous gyms and involve only those who dare to meet him, and defend him, at his level.
The Celtics will need every bit of that, and him.
Boston leaned on Pritchard plenty in the recent past. That was before last postseason spiralled into disaster, when the Celtics squandered a 3-1 series lead over Philadelphia and lost Game 7. It was also before they traded Jaylen Brown in the offseason, to, of all places, Philadelphia.
Now, if the Celtics hope to reclaim their place atop an Eastern Conference that has only grown more cutthroat, they will need Pritchard to be even colder.
The humid gym
“There’s just something about a humid gym,” Pritchard says.
It is 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 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 venues Pritchard handpicks for his offseason workouts, has no air conditioning. A few years ago, a heatwave hit West Linn, Oregon, where he grew up. Outside, temperatures reached 115 degrees, and it grew even more tropical indoors, hitting 120 in the gym at his high school alma mater, where he was training. Pritchard came armed with extra towels because even the ball was sweating that day.
The conditions in Cape Cod are temperate by comparison. Anyway, Pritchard likes the muck.
The muck is why he has spent years recruiting Division II and III players, international players and hometown friends to high school gyms. They are not a polished group of professionals, and Pritchard figures that makes them hungry. He pays for their gas to drive down from Boston to the Cape, or for flights across the country or an ocean, because they can be counted on to play feisty, relentless one-on-one defence.
Today, as always, the work is repetition. Bump his defender, create space, shoot. Beat his defender, reach 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 him. He feels certain he has forced Pritchard into a bad angle. But Saintilus runs past the basket, so he doesn’t see Pritchard attempt an awkward layup. Still, he knows. He shouts over to Soares, or perhaps to the basketball gods, “Did that really go in?”
This routine repeats for close to two hours, about three times a week, throughout the summer. Pritchard runs 150 possessions in his elaborate dance around the court, moving between 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 cast of defenders. They get breaks; he doesn’t. 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 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, then do it again and again, filing every rep away in his mental archive. How much basketball data mining is too much? In his view, the limit does not exist.
“My approach is probably a little different,” he concedes.
In fact, the approach is Kyrie Irving-esque, according to Dave Lewin, the Celtics’ assistant general manager. Lewin spent the early part of his career in Cleveland, in Irving’s orbit. If he 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.”
Pritchard’s fixation started early. In high school, he trained at ClubSport, a gym near West Linn. He was never a physical marvel. “Unassuming-looking,” his former 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 a 13-year journeyman NBA career, but he struck up a kinship with the teenager. For the entire summer before Pritchard’s sophomore year, Blake picked him up three or sometimes four times a week to play one-on-one. Pritchard got beaten, 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 get the better 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 works 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 always chose to come 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 obtained a pair of weighted balls to help him fine-tune 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 thought, he wasn’t trying hard enough.
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 opportunity to work on his hip mobility.
His lunch period was a good opportunity to squeeze in some plyometrics, too. Pritchard 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. His reasoning was that he had read Russell Westbrook made a huge leap between his sophomore and junior years, and he just needed to hone his athleticism to do the same.
Pritchard insists there is a straight line from those battles with Blake, and those in-class hip stretches, and those lunchtime plyometrics, to his current obsession with one-on-one. He is the NBA’s most driven scientist, and those one-on-one sessions are his microscope, a way to examine his game 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 and veer-stepped Joel Embiid, who is 11 inches taller and 75 pounds heavier. Pritchard put his shoulder into the centre, 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.”
If it seems odd that Pritchard defies the basic principles of physics by bodying Embiid, that is because he is not really defying science. It is sleight of hand, or more accurately, 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 estimates he has tested this thousands of times, perhaps double-digit thousands. He has done it against European pros and semi-pros, and against 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 is illogical. Here is a 6-1 (soaking wet) 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 non-restricted area. Among them, Pritchard ranked third, shooting 56%, behind only Jokic and Kevin Durant.
This guard, who does not 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 nearest 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, according to ESPN Research.
This undersized rim threat gets to the basket with power rather than speed, and the only sensible reaction 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, especially in the offseason, when he commits to all those hours of one-on-one. He is also one in the season. After Celtics practice, he turns into a hawker, desperate to find takers 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, having just finished a lift and already thinking about lunch. An assistant coach called him back inside with a simple instruction: come guard Payton.
Tonje was thrilled to be called up. 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, counted off Pritchard’s consecutive makes. Tonje would pressure up, then Pritchard would find an angle and go past him. One! Tonje would cut him off, but Pritchard was already moving into his second counter, then pulling up for a contested fadeaway. Two!
Head coach Joe Mazzulla joined Foulland to watch. He folded his arms, which, for Mazzulla, counted as excitement, and he took in the action from half court as Pritchard went about his dismantling.
At some point, Tonje accepted his fate. Unless he blocked a shot or made a steal, Pritchard’s shot was going in.
“That was my welcome to the league moment,” Tonje says. “There was just no missing.”
Preparing for the next step
Back at the high school on Cape Cod, Pritchard’s shirt, which was light grey 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, studying Brunson film. They are conducting a forensic analysis to work out how the 6-foot-2 Brunson became one of the best players in the world at drawing fouls.
Brunson has just been named NBA Finals MVP, so plenty of players want to be more like him. Pritchard, diminutive, crafty, iso-dominant and now without Jaylen Brown, might be uniquely placed 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 breakout, or continuation, because someone will have 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 work is shared, Pritchard will likely be the de facto committee chair.
Although this season’s early returns have been modest, 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 appears to share that view.
In this year’s NBA general manager survey, released on the eve of the 2026-27 season, the top candidates for breakout players included a slew of recent top-10 picks on the cusp of their second seasons: Dylan Harper, Cooper Flagg and Collin Murray-Boyles. Also receiving votes was Pritchard, a former top-26 pick now entering his seventh year.
These are 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, yes, it is never a bad time to tap into your inner Jalen Brunson. For Pritchard and the Celtics, now is the perfect time. The Celtics are not looking for someone to become a world-beating No. 1 option, since they already have one in Tatum. That is fortunate, because even being Brunson-adjacent is a heavy lift.
One thing about Pritchard is that he loves a doubter. In high school, he kept a burn book cataloguing his detractors and their verdicts: too short, too unathletic, too slow, too bad, so sad. His own father earned a spot in the book simply for suggesting Pritchard look at some Ivy League programmes during his high school recruiting days.
Even now, Pritchard still needles a scout who 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,” the scout wrote. “Maybe a good overseas player, at best.” The scout also named a comparison: a player called Kevin Pangos. No shade to Kevin Pangos, the former Gonzaga standout and two-time All-EuroLeague honouree, Pritchard says, but he was chasing something bigger.
So there are people who don’t think Pritchard has it in him? Good. That is great, in fact, because if nobody had called his pursuit of something bigger a fool’s errand, 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.”
Bet on Payton
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 team’s practice court. There is plenty of hand-waving, and at one point Mazzulla gives Pritchard a sort of elbow, 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 is more, he likes to count on him.
“I’ll always bet on Payton,” Mazzulla says.
It was not 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 playing alongside 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 else 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 that he was repeating history. Pritchard had such tunnel vision about outdoing everyone else that he forgot to bring anyone along with him.
Age and experience have blunted those sharp edges, as has a later letter from Mazzulla offering an olive branch. Pritchard has a softer touch these days. The timing did not work out, but he had hoped to host the newest Celtics at his workout bootcamp on Cape Cod. 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, speaking in the early days of 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 different versions of Payton Pritchard. There is the bench star who sometimes starts, the heave god and the league’s most unexpected iso god. There is the owner of a $44.2 million, two-year extension that will keep him a Celtic as far out as 2030, and a cornerstone of what comes next.
“I can’t wake up,” he says, “and be Wemby.”