Jordan Poole brought the ball over halfcourt a few minutes into the second quarter and squared off against Payton Pritchard. He tried one thing, then another, and another but he couldn't shake Pritchard. He also couldn't keep control of the ball, dribbling it off his knee and back over half-court, which is a turnover.
On his way back up the floor, Pritchard looked to his bench, shook his head, and said “I’ma lock that motherf---er up.”
Pritchard and Poole battled back and forth after that, both scoring 15 points the rest of the way. Poole wasn’t always guarded by Pritchard, but his ill-advised taunting of Pritchard made it clear Poole was taking this as a personal challenge.
Pritchard also took the challenge personally, but for different reasons.
“I really want to be known as a two-way player,” he said after the game. “Sometimes I see things that say I'm a defensive liability and it irks me, and every game I go out and I try to prove that narrative wrong.”
I’ll raise my hand because I’ve called Pritchard that before. And on some nights, he still can be. There's nothing that will change him being 6-foot-1. On some nights, against longer opponents, there might not be much he can do to prevent clean looks.
But even against those bigger players, Pritchard is finding ways to be effective. He’s strong, so he can get a low center of gravity to keep from just getting bulldozed. He’s smart, so when he gets a bad matchup, he can recognize the floor and scram-switch his way out of it before his guy gets the ball. And he’s tenacious, so anyone trying to dribble against him straight-up will have to deal with an absolute nuisance.
Is he going to make an All-Defense team? No. But he’s becoming someone who holds his own defensively.
“(He’s) becoming a complete player,” Joe Mazzulla said. “He takes the pressure off Jrue (Holiday) and Jaylen (Brown), who are the primary guys that are matched up with some of the best players night in and night out.”
Mazzulla loves to reference ball pressure when he talks about Pritchard’s defense. It’s where Pritchard is most effective because he can use his two biggest assets: his quickness and his determination. If Pritchard is going to live up to his goals of being known as more than an offensive player, it will be on the back of his full-court pressure. Not only is it what he’s best at, it’s the one thing everyone can see defensively other than obvious steals or blocked shots.
More than the actual results, though, is Pritchard’s determination to be a meaningful contributor on the defensive end. He knows it’s not always going to go well, but the key is maximizing his strengths to make things tough on opponents.
“They're gonna hit tough shots,” Pritchard said. “I could play great defense and they can still hit it … but it's just coming back and doing it play after play after play, and then by the end of the game, you know, their legs a little bit tired, so it causes them to miss. That’s doing your job.”
He also understands that dogged determination might not be enough. He might have to lean into some tricks to make himself a better defender.
“Eventually, hopefully, I get better at taking charges. I'm not the best at that,” Pritchard said. “There's an art to it. It's timing. I'm not the best -- I don't want to see you flop on it -- I'm not the best at, like, selling things. Even offensively, I don't really just draw fouls as well. And some of it can be a little bit of an acting show.”
I know you might cringe at the thought of Pritchard trying to grift his way to defensive success, but we all need to be as honest with ourselves as Pritchard is. Sometimes a player has to let the refs know something happened. If the goal is to win, then sometimes there's a game to be played within the game.
Pritchard has proven himself to be better than expected offensively. His defense is a work in progress, but it’s better than it has ever been. And considering how much Pritchard pushes himself in every other facet of the game, it’s hard to doubt that he’ll find a way to get better on the defensive end.
“Me trying to be a complete two-way player is something I'm always going to try to strive to be,” he said. “If I can be known as an elite on-ball player and an elite offensive player, then, yeah, that's a big goal of mine.”