Canzano: Legend of Payton Pritchard grows
"Payton just brought a lunch pail and went to work every day.”
Payton Pritchard scored 43 points and had 10 rebounds and punished the Trail Blazers on Wednesday night.
The NFL Combine isn’t a total waste, but the scouts might want to stop measuring hand sizes and make some phone calls.
That’s what the Boston Celtics did with Pritchard.
Dana Altman, Oregon’s basketball coach, told me that the Celtics’ General Manager Brad Stevens called him for a scouting report on Pritchard before the 2020 NBA Draft.
Said Altman: “Brad was calling and saying ‘What do you think?’ I had no doubts. In the worst-case scenario, I thought he’d be a backup point guard for 15 years. Best case, he’d work his way into the starting lineup and be a great player for them.”
Altman has coached college basketball for 45 years. He told me that Pritchard is in the top five of the hardest-working players he’s ever coached and might be No. 1.
“Payton loves it,” Altman said. “He worked at it. He didn’t miss practice. Never missed a game in four years. Kept himself in great shape in the offseason. A lot of guys, they want to put the stuff on the internet about how hard they’re working and all that. Payton just brought a lunch pail and went to work every day.”
Pritchard grew up a few blocks from where I live. His work ethic is the stuff of legend. The local high school coach, Erik Viuhkola, told me a story about Pritchard’s freshman season worth sharing.
Pritchard got up 5:15 a.m. every day and then dribbled a weighted basketball before school. The exterior of the ball was coarse, like low-grit sandpaper. He’d dribble… and dribble… and dribble… and dribble… the ball for an hour, running through his methodical progression of ball-handling drills.
Viuhkola remembers Pritchard showing up to practice one day in his freshman season with his hands wrapped in athletic medical tape.
The coach asked: “What’s with the tape?”
Pritchard said: “Been dribbling.”
He’d bounced the weighted ball until his palms bled, but he didn’t want to miss practice.
My phone blew up on Wednesday night as Pritchard kept making threes. He hit 10 of them in Boston’s 128-118 victory. One long-time Pac-12 observer — John Platz, the Stanford basketball radio analyst — reached out to tell me he thought Pritchard was underevaluated as a college player in Eugene.
Platz said it hit him while watching Pritchard score 29 points in Oregon’s Senior Day win over Stanford in the spring of 2020. Platz said: “He was so sound. Almost playing a different game out there.”
The Celtics picked Pritchard with the No. 26 pick in the first round of the subsequent draft. Platz called it a “miss” by a line of NBA teams.
He said: “The shooting range and the athleticism. He has bounce, lateral, and ‘good enough’ end-to-end speed. I guess leading your team to the Final Four as a freshman starting point guard, to then becoming conference Play of the Year as a senior, is something easily dismissed.”
Don’t miss the sarcasm.
The Blazers had the No. 16 pick in that 2020 NBA Draft. They traded it in a deal that got them Robert Covington. It wasn’t GM Neil Olshey’s dumbest all-time move, but imagine if he’d just picked the kid who grew up a few miles from the NBA team’s practice facility.
Then again, the Blazers already had Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum and just hit the ceiling of the era by advancing to the Western Conference Finals. Trading for Covington was a “win now” move. Portland gave up two firsts (2020 and 2021) and Trevor Ariza in that deal. The Blazers haven’t advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs since.
Meanwhile, Pritchard’s stock is spiking. I keep thinking about the ‘butterfly effect’ and how things unfolded for him over the last four years. If he’s picked by Portland, maybe Pritchard is buried on a roster that includes Lillard and McCollum. Stevens believed in him. Olshey didn’t. That’s an important distinction for a young player.
It’s easy to say Pritchard is a ‘self-made” player and leave it at that. It’s true, he worked relentlessly hard. He’s also athletic. And I saw his parents pour themselves into his love of basketball. His mom and dad were always around at youth sports events and constructed a high-level basketball training business around their children.
There was a terrific youth basketball program in the area, too. Also, a boatload of community support, and he was surrounded by hyper-driven high school classmates such as fellow future pro athletes Jaydon Grant (football) and Tim Tawa (baseball). Then, Pritchard went to Oregon, where he was coached by old-school Altman and had Dillon Brooks, another relentless worker, as an upperclassman teammate.
Sometimes things work out for the best, don’t they?
Pritchard is a winner. I’m not surprised he already has an NBA championship ring. All Pritchard, now 27, did in high school and college was win and make everyone around him better.
On that note, reader Drew reminded me that I needed to follow up about the time capsule I buried a few months before that 2020 NBA Draft.
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Great to see PP succeed in very demanding and ruthless NBA.
His Celtics coach said “you don’t have to tell PP where to go or what to do. Just put him in the game and he lets the game come to him and instinctively knows what to do. He just plays!”
PP is one of my all-time favorite Oregon basketball players. Leadership, ball handling and dagger-like threes...he had it all in college and continues to impress in the NBA.