Payton Pritchard always felt like he could get here, even if saying so caused anyone’s eyes to roll.
“I did always believe I would be a pro,” Pritchard said Sunday Morning at the Boston Celtics practice facility. “It was delusional, but I just had a crazy belief in myself that I truly felt like I was talented enough and I worked hard enough to be any type of player I wanted to be, and I never put a limit on myself.”
That's all fine. It makes for a nice quote, and people might get tingles when they read it. But a lot of players have said this and it doesn’t change the fact that only a fraction of a percent of everyone who has tried has even gotten to the league, never mind the $44 million contract extension.
So how does a six-foot-nothing kid from Oregon become a pro, a Sixth Man of the Year, a champion, and a critical piece to an historic franchise?
“It’s just the daily habits,” Pritchard said. “Waking up every day if you set out a plan and a routine and do it every day and do it with the same determination and effort, and over time, after a couple of weeks, a couple months, you’ll start to see progress. Some people show up one day, work hard, then the next day they’re a little tired and they don’t do it. So for me it’s waking up with the same effort and drive and just keep chipping away at it.”
It sounds easy but it’s not. Waking up every day and doing the little things that stack up is difficult. Pritchard is right about how easy it is to take a day off. Getting to the league is about talent, but it’s also a war of attrition. Talented guys can’t make it without the work ethic, and hard workers can’t make it without talent.
“You take a look at his career … He just maintained a level of toughness, a level of resilience,” Joe Mazzulla said. “It's looked different at every stage of his career, and I think that's a space of younger players and new players coming in, of they're so used to having it done a certain type of way, or ‘This is my game,’ whereas he was just like, ‘I don't really have a game. I'm just going to do what I need to do.’ I think that competitiveness, but also that open-mindedness is kind of what makes him who he is.”
The human brain can do amazing things if it wants. And if there's one thing Pritchard’s brain wants more than anything, it’s as much basketball as possible. When Mazzulla lingered with the media after his Sunday morning session, chatting about an answer he gave, Pritchard waited impatiently for his turn to speak. Eventually, he called out to Mazzulla that this was cutting into his shooting time, prodding his coach to move along.
“He just loves the game — like, genuinely loves it,” Charlotte Hornets Head Coach, and former Celtics assistant Charles Lee said. “You probably take the money out of it. He just loves the hoop. And so every day to be able to lace it up, to compete, he finds great joy in that. I remember coming in in the morning, and he's having a blast over there doing his ball-handling and barefooted drills on the side of the court and stuff. He's just a maniac, and he loves it.”
Lee is right about Pritchard loving basketball enough to do it for free. But Pritchard doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. He’s getting nearly $16 million this season and next before his big extension, which will double his career earnings. Still, it was less than the maximum he could have gotten.
“I feel like $22 million a year is quite a lot of money, especially since I was going from making about eight,” Pritchard said. “I like to just take that, and then you can always work for the next one. So stay hungry and maybe go get after the next one, be a better player—three years down the road, maybe I’m a better player, and then hopefully I can get rewarded like that again.”
Pritchard is never going to be satisfied. In reality, this contract would be a very fitting final chapter for someone like him. A 26th overall pick who barely played early in his career — who asked for a trade because of it — starting 50 games in a season and then getting a contract to push his career earnings to about $85 million is a great story. If this was a movie, Pritchard signing on the dotted line would be where the credits started to roll, but in his head, he always seems to be re-living act one.
“He just plays with a chip on his shoulder, but doesn't have an ego,” Mazzulla said. “If you tell him he's starting, if you tell him he's coming off the bench, if you tell him he's playing 20 (minutes), if you tell him he's playing 30, the chip on his shoulder never changes. He doesn't need the affirmation to be an elite competitor.”
The lack of ego might be the secret sauce to Pritchard’s success. For all his highest hopes, he’s never approached the game like it owes him something, or that there's a certain script that needs to be followed.
“To me a starter is the amount of minutes you play,” Pritchard said. “Do you finish games? Are you playing 30-plus minutes? How do you impact the game is what really matters to me. It’s probably an ego thing, but I don’t really care to heard my name called at the beginning of the game. The first five minutes of the game really has no affect on the game, and if that’s what Joe thinks benefits the team the most is me coming off the bench and playing those minutes, then I’m gonna try to do it and be the best In those minutes.”
Pritchard turns 29 in January, which means he’ll be 32 in the final year of his new deal. That's the age when guards his size start to fade away. Conventional wisdom suggests this is the last big contract Pritchard will get.
But Pritchard has never been one to follow conventional wisdom.
“I’m going after my personal greatness for basketball,” Pritchard said. “I’m not chasing anybody but myself and I’m just trying to see how great I personally can be. I don’t know what that is, but I wake up hungry every day trying to find a new way to get a little bit better every year and make adjustments. Maybe I just keep developing. I don’t know how far I can take it, so, I wake up hungry though trying to get there.”
Add us as a preferred source on Google