Payton Pritchard's Pasty Penchant for Points

Basketball is not a sport, it's a way of life.

I wanted with all my heart to find some cute way to work a Peyton Place framing around this conversation about Payton Pritchard—for those unfamiliar, Peyton Place was a popular ’60s soap opera, based on a novel by Grace Metalious, set in a small New England town of the same fictious eponymous moniker—but, for the sake of all parties, I thought better of it. While you undoubtedly come here for my wanton disregard for the judicious application of dated references, even my old soul couldn’t reach back to the ’60s to extract something there.

I also discovered a lesser-known jazz album, Payton’s Place, by a trumpeter named Nicholas Payton whose father, Walter, is not the greater known running back. And while the jazz-to-basketball analogy is fertile ground, the obscurity of the album rendered that option moot.

So, rather than pepper this article with my typical random assortment of pop culture references, we’re just going to talk about how damn impressive—and potentially historic—Payton Pritchard has been thus far this season. We talked a few weeks ago about the incendiary start that Pritchard was off to, knowing that, though noteworthy, regression was surely inevitable. While that has proven to be somewhat true, Pritchard is still getting them up at a nearly unforeseen level for a bench player.

Already 15 games into the NBA season and playing a career-high 28.1 minutes per contest, Pritchard is averaging career-bests across the board with 15.3 points on 46.9% FG, while making 3.7 threes on 8.7 attempts per game. That’s 42.3% from distance—also a career-high—on efficient volume that you almost never see from a reserve. In fact, were Pritchard to keep this pace up all season, he would be just the second player in NBA history to play at least 50 games off the bench while making more than 3.5 threes per game and shooting better than 40% from distance—joining Dāvis Bertāns, who pulled off the feat in 50 games off the bench with WAS in ’20, making 3.7 a game at an impressive 42.4% rate. Not surprisingly, considering his own hot start, Buddy Hield is actually on pace to pull off the feat as well, also making 3.6 threes but at an absurd 45.1% (Deep dive on Buddy is loading…).

If you’re still unfamiliar with Pritchard, he is a fifth-year point guard out of Oregon who was taken, somewhat controversially, by Boston with the 26th pick in the ’20 draft. A large part of the derisive chatter was the prevailing notion that, as an undersized guard with just relatively okay athleticism, Pritchard would struggle to find footing in the league. Particularly because, though a good playmaker in college—he led the Pac-12 (RIP) in assists his senior season with 5.5 a game—he was not seen as an especially creative playmaker or a passer of the elite variety.

No, Pritchard was a scorer first, and as such, he also led the Pac-12 in points per game his senior season at 20.5 on his way to being named a consensus All-American. But despite his impressive performance in college, 6’2” scoring guards  (and if Pritchard is 6’2”, I’m 6’5”) are just not a player model highly sought after in the NBA, so Pritchard was not seen as a major prospect.

While a liability at the time, I posit that part of Pritchard’s charm now is that you don’t see many diminutive scoring guards in the league. In a professional sport where the average player’s height is 6’6”, there is plenty of space but little opportunity for little guards, particularly those who aren’t of the distributing variety—Pritchard only averages 2.3 assists per game in his career, just 0.1 more than teammate Al Horford for his. More so, if we’re being honest, while an asset in Boston, being a small white scoring guard is usually a “Do Not Pass Go” card for NBA success.

Seriously, name me the last small white scoring guard you can think of. Not a player who could score but was a distributor first—a la John Stockton, Scott Skiles, Mark Price, or Steve Nash—but a little white guy who was in there to get you buckets. Steve Kerr and JJ Redick only come to mind (please leave other choices in the comments), and that’s not because my addled brain struggles with retrieval.

In the history of the NBA, there have only been 22 instances of a player 6’2” or shorter averaging 15 or more points while dishing out three or fewer assists. Of those 22 occasions, they have only occurred with 12 different players. Of those 12 players, just three of them are white: Max Zaslofsky, Bill Sharman, and Payton Pritchard.

I have no misconceptions that you venture to this newsletter because of my sociology degree, but let me cook for a second. Zaslofsky and Sharman were Jewish players competing at a time when the league, because of urban dynamics, had a much larger Jewish presence. So, while both were melanin-deficient, relative short kings in their own right—particularly Sharman, who is woefully under-discussed for his massive, broad-spectrum impact on the game over decades of contributions*—Pritchard is doing something that not only hasn’t been seen since the nascent stages of the league but is doing so against much greater odds in terms of the sport’s demographics.

*If you don’t know: separate from his impressive playing, coaching, and executive careers, Sharman modernized exercise regimens and created the morning shootaround as a coach—much to the dismay of hungover players for decades to come.

Why does race matter? In terms of Pritchard’s play, it doesn’t—but the reality shouldn’t be disregarded. Nor should it necessarily be celebrated. Still, it warrants acknowledgment: short white scorers are a rare sight in the NBA. It’s rumored that every time Pritchard nails a three, Teddy Dupay quietly whispers, “We finally did it.”

While Pritchard's penchant was always to fill it up, it still took some time for him to find the best ways to score in the league. Pritchard entered attempting to be more of a penetrative driver, in his first year, 28.5% of his shots came within ten feet and 40.7% of his total points were from 2-point range. But the Celtics guard has since figured out as a little guy where his bread is best buttered. This season, he attempts just 12.9% of his total shots from ten feet or closer and gets only 19.8% of his points from within the arc. He’s also increased his catch-and-shoot looks from 40.7% in his rookie season to 50% this year—averaging 7.6 points per game on those looks, good for sixth in the league.

Pritchard’s shot chart in his rookie season (left) vs. this year

It might be a tough ask to expect Pritchard to sustain a pace of 8.7 three-point attempts per game, considering it's 14th in the league and the highest for any reserve player this season, especially since he shot just 4.7 per game last year.

Part of the jump is due to Pritchard playing 5.8 more minutes per contest, however, he’s also shooting with far more confidence and aggressiveness. Pritchard has yet to attempt fewer than five threes in a game this season through Boston’s first 15 outings. Last season, he attempted fewer than five threes in 41 of his 82 appearances. And to flatten the minutes argument, Pritchard is averaging 11.1 three-point attempts per 36 minutes this season (7th in the NBA; LaMelo leads at 13.5, with Jett Howard a surprising tied for second at 12.1) versus 7.5 last year. Pritchard also has no conscience where distance is concerned, already attempting 73 threes from 26 feet or farther, making 27 of them. For comparison, Steph Curry has taken only 55 from that range, though at 24 makes he’s converting them at a healthier percentage (43.6%).

All this leads to Pritchard almost certainly destroying the record for threes made in a season by a reserve player—a mark currently held by former Heat guard Wayne Ellington, who made 218 threes in the 2018 season. (He actually had 227 for the season, but he started two games.)

If Pritchard stays on his current pace in terms of makes—which still feels a bit unsustainable—and plays, let’s say, 70 games this year (he played all 82 last season), he would make 259 threes. Even if he cools off, he’s already built a significant head start. Barring injury, it seems inevitable that the record will become Pritchard’s. At 55 made threes through 15 games, Pritchard is already 25.1% of the way to breaking Ellington’s record while just 18.3% of the way through Boston’s season. Were Pritchard to drop to just 3.0 threes per game and play only 55 more games, he would still finish with 220—a new record.

The other element of Pritchard’s improvement that has kept him on the floor is his defense. While not on the level of Boston’s other star guards, he’s become serviceable enough not to be a liability. Teams would love to exploit Pritchard’s size by posting him up, but he uses his strength, low center of gravity, and quick hands to battle down low. Considering the defensive chops of his teammates, the fact that Pritchard’s 1.1 steals per game are tied with Jaylen Brown for second on the team is no throwaway stat. Pritchard will never be on the floor because of his ability to get stops, but he deserves recognition for how hard he works to remain engaged and not be a liability on that end.

All of this is to say nothing of Pritchard’s greatest skill: his uncanny ability to hit shots to close out quarters. While in most cases this would feel more like a parlor trick than a weaponized part of the game plan, Pritchard’s ability to hit these shots has become a mechanism for taking the wind out of teams’ sails to close out a quarter or half. When the ball gets into his hands in those last-second opportunities, it has a strange, Devin Hester-like charged excitement to the moment, and you can see teams now responding in kind, blitzing Pritchard to try to get someone else to take that late shot.

Pritchard will never be a star. He’ll probably never have a song written about or performed in his honor. There will probably never be a movie adaptation of his story (unlike Peyton Place, which was made into a film in 1957). His skillset and size mean he’s likely never anything more than an impactful bench player, albeit a fan favorite in that capacity. As such, while he’s riding this heater, maybe, just for this season, the three-point line at TD Garden will come to be known as "Payton’s Place." (Hey, we did it!)