The heave-making fourth-quarter star Payton Pritchard the Boston Celtics need to make a repeat NBA title run
FROM THE SOLD-OUT stands in Boston’s TD Garden, Terry Pritchard could feel the swell of anticipation building around him as his son checked in to the game with four seconds left before halftime. Seated about nine rows behind the Celtics bench, Terry rose from his seat, along with thousands more, anticipating what might happen next.
It was June 17, 2024, and the Celtics were hosting the Dallas Mavericks in Game 5 of the NBA Finals. At that moment in a potential title-clinching game for Boston, Mavericks star Luka Doncic was at the free throw line, trying to convert a three-point play. Celtics guard Payton Pritchard had checked in for Derrick White, with the Celtics comfortably leading by 18 points.
From his perch in a fifth-floor suite above midcourt, Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens looked on, and he, like everyone else in the arena — if not the entire league — knew what would happen next..
“He’ll never not take a heave,” Stevens told ESPN of Pritchard. “It’s not about what his shooting percentages are. It’s about winning. And I love that.”
The shots provide huge momentum swings and are often worth more than the point total, Stevens said. Pritchard proved as much in Game 2, when he sank a buzzer-beating 34-footer at the end of the third quarter — his only points of the game — that gave the Celtics an eight-point lead.
Boston won, and Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla called it the “play of the game.”
With the Celtics seemingly cruising toward their 18th championship in Game 5, Doncic missed his free throw. Celtics big man Al Horford grabbed the rebound with two seconds left, turned his head and immediately passed to Pritchard, who was calling for the ball.
“Here’s Pritchard,” broadcaster Mike Breen announced, as Pritchard sprinted up court, taking one dribble before entering his shooting motion. “He loves these.”
“In the moment of the game and the adrenaline, it doesn’t matter how far it is, it just makes you lock in to a whole other level,” Pritchard told ESPN. “I don’t know how to explain it, but the moment is there and everything slows down — and I just truly believe that when I put it up, I can make this.”
On the bench, Celtics reserves were already celebrating as the ball sailed through the air from half court, raising their arms in anticipation.
“BANG!” Breen announced as the heave splashed through the net, a 49-footer that registered as the longest made shot in the Finals in nearly a quarter century. “Pritchard at the buzzer!”
The Garden erupted.
“I’ve been in TD Garden now for 12 years of basketball games,” Stevens said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it like that — at that very moment.”
A frenetic celebration around Pritchard ensued, and the Celtics went on to win their 18th NBA title. This season has been an extension, an encore celebration for the 28-year-old Pritchard.
He’s averaging a career-best 14.1 points and has scored 664 total points off the bench, the most in the NBA.
He has made the seventh-most 3-pointers for any player overall — on 41.5% shooting. He has been one of the NBA’s best fourth-quarter scorers all season. And when Pritchard brings the ball up the floor for the Celtics, they’re averaging 1.21 points per possession — a figure that is sixth best among NBA players who have brought up the ball for 800 or more possessions, according to Second Spectrum tracking.
The others on that list? Cleveland’s Darius Garland, Denver’s Jamal Murray, Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Dallas’ Kyrie Irving and Golden State’s Stephen Curry. Of that crew, Pritchard is the only one who comes off the bench. Pritchard is a front-runner for Sixth Man of the Year, a candidate for Most Improved Player and a vital piece of a Celtics team that aims to repeat as champion.
For Pritchard, it’s the culmination of a pursuit that began so many years ago.
IN 2015, WHEN Blake Griffin was already a five-time All-Star with the LA Clippers, he received a message from his alma mater, the University of Oklahoma.
Lon Kruger, then the Sooners’ men’s basketball coach, relayed to Griffin that there was a 16-year-old in Oregon who had verbally committed to Oklahoma, and Kruger wanted Griffin to meet him. Griffin obliged. He gave Pritchard a pass to come to the arena after the Clippers faced the Trail Blazers in Portland, and the two met for the first time.
“He was super shy,” Griffin told ESPN. “We talked for a little bit, but I mean, dude, when I say he was scrawny, I was like, man, this kid must be nasty on the court.”
Pritchard had long known his appearance didn’t exactly convey that he was a high-level player — let alone someone with NBA aspirations. Growing up, he wrote in notebooks that he wanted to play in the league, but even his father, a former tight end at Oklahoma, wasn’t so sure.
“Obviously, he used to get mad at me because I’d tell him, ‘Hey, you got to have a plan B in school,'” Terry Pritchard said. “And he’d get mad at me and say, ‘I’m going to prove you wrong. You don’t believe me.'”
During middle school, Pritchard would set an alarm for 5:30 a.m., enter the family garage and dribble a coarse, weighted ball for up to an hour, sometimes to the point that his fingers bled. During lunch, he’d run around the school track. After school, he’d work out for another hour. For years he did this at least five days a week. He won four state championships at West Linn High School in Oregon, earned various state player of the year honors and became a four-star recruit with offers from blue-blood college programs.
Ultimately, despite the meeting with Griffin, Pritchard chose to stay closer to home to play for Oregon, where he started in the Final Four as a freshman. As a senior, he was named the Pac-12 Player of the Year, was a consensus All-American and won the Bob Cousy Award as the nation’s top point guard.
“There was a drive there, a consistency that not many players have,” Ducks coach Dana Altman told ESPN. “They give themselves a long stretch off, or a day here, a day there. Payton didn’t do that.”
From afar, Danny Ainge, then the Celtics’ president of basketball operations, paid close attention. He loved Pritchard’s shooting, his playmaking and especially his competitiveness, and told ESPN he considered Pritchard as driven as any player he’d ever seen.
Ainge sang Pritchard’s praises to other members of the Celtics’ front office and made them watch one of his college games three times.
In 2020, the NBA schedule was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, moving the draft from June to November, giving Pritchard an even longer wait than most to be selected. On draft night, the Celtics selected Pritchard, with the 26th pick in the first round.
When Ainge spoke with Pritchard that night, the newest Celtic — who hadn’t been able to play an organized game since March, when Oregon’s season was shut down — said, matter-of-factly, “When can I get to work?”
AROUND THE TEAM, coaches and front-office staff quickly saw how Pritchard challenged Celtics stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown to one-on-one sessions after practice. They saw how he’d challenge others to do the same. They heard how he’d return to the practice facility at night for running and shooting workouts. A reputation was quickly established.
“He works as hard as anybody I’ve ever seen in my 20-plus years of being around the game,” said Stevens, who coached Pritchard as a rookie.
“He’s the kind of guy that, especially when I was coaching in college, I would have to change or tailor our practice plans because I would know that he’s doing way more,” Stevens said. “You don’t want to take that away from him, because I think he’s always been a great worker. I think as he’s aged, he’s gotten even better about how to work and the right way to approach it. But he’s really got to. I mean, he’s at the highest echelon of work ethic for sure.”
Asked about these workouts, Pritchard cites a player so well known for them that it has become an NBA cliché: Stephen Curry.
“They talk about his shooting. He’s unbelievable, right? But … he never stops moving, so that makes him so hard to guard. By the fourth quarter, when guys are tired of chasing, he’s still going the same speed,” Pritchard said of Curry. “So at the end of the day, conditioning is really that. … When you start to get so tired, you start to lose your train of thought and everything goes into that.”
Even on a stacked roster with Tatum and Brown and several deep playoff runs of experience, Pritchard averaged 19.2 minutes per game as a rookie, eighth best on the team.
As the season progressed, he became a steady double-digit scorer. After his rookie campaign, Pritchard earned all-summer league first team for the Celtics — and then scored 92 points in a Portland pro-am game the following month.
The following season, when Stevens transitioned to an executive role, Pritchard’s minutes dropped, slightly, to 14.1 per game, under first-year head coach Ime Udoka. The Celtics reached the NBA Finals, where they fell to Golden State in six games.
In July 2022, still reeling after the Finals loss, the Celtics sought more of a scoring punch around Tatum and Brown and added veteran guard Malcolm Brogdon.
That acquisition helped create a logjam at the guard position already crowded with Marcus Smart and Derrick White. The following month, the team added Griffin, who was immediately struck by how hard Pritchard — the once-scrawny kid he helped recruit — worked on his game.
“This kid will play one-on-one with anyone at any hour of the day, all day, every day,” Griffin said. “And he is just torching guys. I mean, he’s going at [Brown], going at [Tatum], he’s going at guys. And not to say they don’t get some stops every now and then. And not to say they weren’t going at people, too, but I was so impressed with just his mindset and then also his work ethic. This guy works his ass off.”
“That has been his great separator his whole life,” Stevens said. “It continues to be.”
Still, Pritchard saw his minutes sink to 13.1 per game in his third season — when Mazzulla took over for Udoka, who was suspended for violating team policies — and he played in just 48 regular-season games after averaging 68 the two seasons before.
It was agonizing. To fall further down the bench after all the work he’d put in was demoralizing.
“He was losing his mind not getting minutes,” a team source said.
Pritchard called his father, Terry, often.
“Just wait your time,” Terry told his son. “I don’t care if you’re getting in for one minute — just be the best player on the court for that one minute.”
Griffin saw the toll, too.
“Hey, just stick with it, man,” Griffin told Pritchard. “Just stick with it. I get your frustration.”
Pritchard didn’t — or couldn’t. When the February trade deadline approached, Pritchard asked to be traded.
The front office made calls to try to honor the request, team sources said, but no call yielded enough interest to warrant a deal, and Pritchard remained a Celtic.
“I had to sit behind a lot of people, a lot of good guards that honestly I’ve learned a lot from,” Pritchard said. “But it was tough to sit there for those times.”
Pritchard continued to attack practices, post-practice one-on-one sessions, scrimmages and pickup games. In their final two regular-season games, the Celtics sat several starters before the 2023 playoffs, and Pritchard made the most of his minutes. On April 7, he scored 22 points in a win over Toronto. Two days later, in a win over Atlanta, Pritchard made nine 3-pointers and tallied 30 points, 14 rebounds and 11 assists for his first triple-double. The Celtics’ front office took note.
“The way his career has gone as far as playing time and not playing time, he’s always handled it the right way,” Mazzulla told reporters after the game. “He has a competitiveness, a professionalism and work ethic about him.”
Internally, there was belief that Payton was ready for a bigger role, and, that offseason, the Celtics turned over their guard depth, first trading Smart, then Brogdon, and acquiring former Bucks All-Star Jrue Holiday. Then, in October 2023, they signed Pritchard to a four-year, $30 million deal.
BY THE MORNING of October 28, 2024, before facing the Celtics in Boston, Milwaukee Bucks head coach Doc Rivers went over the game plan with his team.
He specifically circled Pritchard’s name.
“This guy comes in,” Rivers said, “and he’s a game changer.”
His words proved prophetic. When Pritchard caught the ball with about six seconds left in the third quarter and dribbled up the court, Rivers’ hands dropped to his knees. When Pritchard pulled up from the right wing for a step-back 3-pointer with 0.4 seconds left, Rivers watched it go through the net, and his gaze sank to the floor, defeated.
It was Pritchard’s sixth 3-pointer of the game, and it came during a decisive 18-2 run that stretched from the third quarter and into the fourth — a “gut-punch,” Pritchard said after.
“Payton, what he does speaks for itself. He’s a killer,” the Celtics’ Brown said after. “And he’s always looking to put pressure on the defense. And we just played through him tonight. And we love that.”
Pritchard has 16 games with five or more 3-pointers when coming off the bench this season, the most in a season in Celtics history and one game shy of matching the NBA record. He also ranks in the top five in made catch-and-shoot 3-pointers and catch-and-shoot 3-point field goal percentage this season. And his average made 3-pointer distance is 26.7 feet, about the same as Curry.
In some ways, it is fitting that his heaves and long 3-pointers have gained folk-hero acclaim, because Pritchard always heard that his dream of making the NBA was just that. That part of him has never left.
“I am 100% still the same person,” Pritchard said. “Every day, I’m trying to prove that I can still reach another level. I can still show people what I’m trying to become. That’s why I’m always challenging the best that we have — like Jaylen and Jayson. I’m trying to become as good as them one day. That’s why I challenge them. I’m trying to keep taking steps to better myself, which, at the end of the day, is only going to better our team.”
Two months after the Celtics’ championship win, Pritchard headed to receive another ring, this one at a ceremony officiated by Griffin.
ON A WARM Saturday in August 2024, Pritchard stood at the Wychmere Beach Club on the elbow of Cape Cod, wearing a white linen suit with a peak lapel. Next to him, in a Vera Wang wedding dress, was his soon-to-be wife, Emma MacDonald. And next to them, in a navy tuxedo with a shawl collar, was Griffin.
Before them were hundreds of family and friends, including many members of the Celtics organization, along with the team’s newest championship trophy.
Pritchard had asked Griffin to lead the ceremony in part because Griffin had played a key role in Pritchard’s relationship with his wife, even attending one of their first dates, in Dallas, during a Celtics road trip. (“Yo, come to dinner with us,” Pritchard told Griffin. “I don’t want it to be weird.”)
But it was also meaningful for Pritchard because he recalled how much Griffin consoled him during their lone season together, when Pritchard ultimately asked for a trade request.
“I love Blake,” Pritchard said. “I owe him a lot, just to help me get through that year. Just having somebody as a positive figure and as big as the person he is to really try to help me through that. I feel like he really took me under his wing.”
That season together in Boston marked Griffin’s 16th and final year in the NBA. Retired now, the six-time NBA All-Star has enjoyed Pritchard’s success from afar. “He’s one of those guys that makes you go harder because you see how hard he’s going,” Griffin said.
Pritchard is still searching for balance. His obsession with the game remains. “I live it, breathe it. I think about it,” he said. “My wife, sometimes she’ll be talking to me and then she’s like, ‘Oh my God, you’re thinking about basketball right now.’ And I really am. My mind’s always consumed with it and I’ll put everything into it to become what I want to be.”
Source: espn.com