https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/50259828/payton-pritchard-celtics-iso-king
It's 6:45 in the morning in the middle of June, and Pritchard has just walked into the humid gym of his choice, at a high school on the southeastern tip of Cape Cod. He'd pulled up to school grounds 10 minutes earlier but had to wait outside while his trainer, Michael Soares, phoned a staffer to open the locked double doors.
This gym, like most of the unglamorous gyms Pritchard handpicks for his offseason workouts, doesn't boast amenities such as air-conditioning. A few years ago, a heat wave slammed West Linn, Oregon, where he grew up. Outside, temperatures ticked up to 115 degrees, and it grew only more tropical indoors, hitting 120 in the gym at his high school alma mater, where he was conducting workouts. Pritchard came armed with extra towels because even the ball was sweating that day.
The conditions in his Cape Cod accommodations are temperate by comparison. And anyway, Pritchard likes the muck.
The muck is why he has been recruiting Division II and III basketball players, international guys and hometown buddies to high school gyms for years now. They're not exactly a ragtag motley crew, but they're not polished professionals either, and Pritchard figures that makes them hungry. He'll pay for their gas to drive down from Boston to the Cape, or their flights to cross the country or an ocean, because they can be counted on to play feisty, relentless one-on-one defense.
Today, as ever, it's death by repetition for Pritchard. Bump his defender, create space, shoot. Beat his defender, get to his spot, shoot. React to his defender chasing him. Drive to the basket because his defender is chasing him from too far behind.
About 30 minutes in, Bruce Saintilus, recently of Division III Clark University and one of Pritchard's defenders for the summer, is the one chasing Pritchard. He's feeling himself, certain that he has forced Pritchard into a bad angle. But Saintilus runs past the basket, so he doesn't get to see Pritchard attempt an awkward layup. Still, Saintilus knows. He shouts over -- to Soares, or maybe to the basketball gods for forsaking him and his defense -- "Did that really go in?"
It did.
And so it goes for close to two hours about three times a week throughout the summer. Pritchard will do 150 possessions in his elaborate dance around the basketball court -- the block, the elbow, the other elbow, the 3-point line, the corner, the wing, the high slot, the middle, the opposite slot -- going one-on-one versus a rotating cast of defenders. They'll get breaks, he won't, and if Pritchard shoots under 60% on the day, his defenders eat like kings at Chipotle and then send him the bill.
He considers it a small price to pay for the thousands of live looks he gets over the summer, for the chance to square up against one man and try to best him. And then do it again and again, filing it all away in his mental archive. How much basketball data mining is too much? The limit does not exist.
