Payton Pritchard reached out to invite former teammates who hadn’t taken part in his summer workouts before. Will Johnson, who spent recent years breaking into a new job in financial services while coaching, received the opportunity to draw up defenses against his fellow former Oregon guard. For Paul White, Pritchard’s former roommate recovering from ACL surgery, the runs gave him a chance to reunite on the same side as Pritchard and see how he trains now. It hasn’t changed much.
“Payton was a person where, he felt as if that he was doubted,” White said. “He used that doubt and he used it as fire in order to fuel his work ethic. So what he would do is he would get up in the morning, he would lift with the weight trainer at Oregon. Granted, this is all something that he’s doing on his own. This isn’t team-coordinated … before classes. I think he might get up shots after that. Then, he will go to breakfast, he will go to class, then he will get there before practice, get in his shots. He would go through practice and then after practice, he would work on finishing with a manager and this was a religious routine for him, and then I think he would spend his nights doing like a quick little (10-20) minute ball-handling drills which ended up going viral — when he was doing it in his garage. He would do that just about every day with a heavy ball, he would do like quick pats and things like that. And so he was dedicated. He always had a vision for himself.”
Pritchard began crafting his offseason workout plan similarly since the Celtics drafted him in 2020 and travel returned to normalcy following the pandemic. He called on professionals from overseas, college players, friends and former teammates to fit in where they could, paying some to travel to Massachusetts and join his runs. This year, they took place in Cape Cod, long Pritchard’s favorite summer destination. There, he worked on positions he’ll find himself in while assuming a larger role this season, whether he starts or remains on the bench — a status he’s indifferent about. Pritchard needed to challenge himself more, so he intensified the workouts.
White stood surprised when Pritchard explained the plan to him. Man, that’s crazy, he thought.
First, Pritchard lined up defenders for isolation work across different spots on the floor, attacking for several possessions before rotating in new defenders. They get the rest, while Pritchard kept going to build his stamina. In the past, he placed down money for stops opponents could garner against him that they’d shoot for at the free throw line later in the day. The isolation portion took roughly 90 minutes across as many as 13 spots on the floor. Johnson and others remarked how Pritchard never tires.
“This summer’s been a lot more three-on-three, trying to put him in different actions that he’s gonna be in, whether it’s wide pin downs or flare-slip situations, pick-and-roll stuff,” Brooks DeBisschop, Pritchard’s long-time friend who took part in the workouts, said. “Some one-on-one stuff, but I think right now the biggest thing he’s trying to add to his game is just off-platform shooting, whether it’s coming off a handoff, running away from the rim and able to catch square and get a shot up, some of those difficult shots, and then he’s been working on his in-between stuff, which he’s already really efficient at, but adding a floater to his game and improving at that, and then just sharpening the stuff that he’s already good at.”
The routine also included lifting and the open gym portion where Pritchard and friends scrimmage. He’ll typically stack the team against him with the most talented players, and Johnson focused on scheming up ways to slow Pritchard. Johnson mixed up ball screen coverages, brought weak side defenders over and double-teams from behind in rotation. Pritchard even saw some triple-teams, but his team still won every game. The two-week session saw players come-and-go, so Pritchard’s friend and business partner Michael Soares, a local trainer in Boston, oversaw finding personnel to fit what Pritchard needed work on, whether big centers or long wing defenders.
White caught an elbow to the face after pump-faking on the first day, drawing a cut to his face that required stitches. Later that day, White split his lip open. The runs get physical. They don’t go overboard to where it takes away from the development. Instead, Pritchard wants his defenders to restrict his movement, use arm bars and play as aggressively as they can. White, who’s joked with Pritchard since their Oregon days, including about Pritchard’s love for The Notebook, stressed that the Celtics star didn’t give him his lacerations.
“Or else he would have been in a trash can,” White said.
“Payton tells them he wants them to be as as aggressive as they can. They can come double him. They can come do whatever they feel they need to. He’s gonna fight through the foul. He doesn’t want dirty basketball, of course. He doesn’t want someone that’s gonna start wrestling out there, but he likes the physicality, he likes the challenge and so he wants to make his training days harder than what the NBA game may look like for him, and so even if he’s not gonna go against double teams, he wants to be prepared for it anyway.”
Pritchard brought the runs to Spain later in July, when he connected with another old friend who became family while growing up. Pablo Ferreiro, a recently-retired second division Spanish pro, lived with Pritchard in Oregon for months at a time during their childhood summers. It gave him the chance to compete with and learn from the future NBA star, who he met at a camp that Pritchard’s father oversaw in Spain. That exposed him to the differences between American and Spanish basketball cultures. The skill development and obsessive passion for sport that Pritchard embodied stood out as a US advantage. For European countries, an emphasis on the team dynamic, in part, allowed the world to catch up to America’s long-running basketball dominance.
They decided to combine those sensibilities at a camp they named Sublime. Ferreiro held the first in northeast Spain before Pritchard joined him for the second session in El Vendrell, near Barcelona. Pritchard answered questions, taught and worked out in front of the players from the US, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and Poland who participated and lived together throughout the week. Campers got to see how his motor never stopped, how he handled every rep and enjoyed every moment he had on the court. They even caught a glimpse of him scoring 70 points in a game.
It’s a new tradition Pritchard hoped persists past this summer alongside his 1ofOne one-on-one tournament that returned for a second time this year to the Boston area, and the summer runs that propelled him to the Sixth Man Award — and could push him beyond into 2025-26.
“We said, OK, let’s create a camp right now to create a complete player,“ Ferreiro said. ”American coaches are gonna teach the skills development like they do in the US, and we’re gonna have some Spanish and European coaches that are gonna teach the American kids who come to the camps, because we’re blending the coaches and the players, so the Americans will benefit from being coached by pro Spanish coaches about spacing, pick-and-roll reading, defense-reading, how to control the game, read the game, and the Spanish players that go there, they’re all gonna benefit from the American side of training with the one-on-one, the footwork, the one-on-one reading, how to generate advantages. So to sum it up, it would be America will teach you how to generate advantages … and then Europe is gonna teach you how to make the most out of those advantages.“
