The Celtics are going to get worse. They can’t afford to keep this roster together anymore, so the Celtics will pull the stopper and drain some of the talent from the team.
What Brad Stevens hopes to do is minimize the damage, getting cheaper but not getting so much worse that they fall behind other teams in the East. They will return to the pack, but they still have a chance to be at or near the top of it if they can figure out the right moves.
At the top of that list is trading Jrue Holiday, who is due more than $100 million over the next three seasons. At 34 years old, Holiday still has plenty to offer, but his best days are behind him. Even though he wants to stay, he’s probably the first out the door.
“I think the things that I can control, I do my best to control. But other than that, I try my best not to worry about it,” Holiday said in his exit interview. “Who comes back, roster changes and things like that, it's not really in my control.”
There are two big reasons why trading Holiday isn’t a bigger emergency: Derrick White growing into an elite guard who can handle the same duties as Holiday, and Payton Pritchard’s growth into a full-time rotation player.
Pritchard’s evolution has been massively important to this whole process. Where he was once just an energy guy who came in to change the flow of games, Pritchard has become a staple for Joe Mazzulla’s Celtics, which earned him the Sixth Man of the Year award this season.
“I feel like I'm on the right path,” Pritchard said as he accepted the award. “The hard work I put in and the grind, everything … it's paying off. And so it just shows me that I'm gonna continue to do what I'm gonna do and keep putting (the work) in.”
It’s Pritchard’s progression, more than anything, that minimizes the sting of a potential Holiday departure. Pritchard hit 255 3-pointers this season, second most in team history and hit did it shooting 40.7%. He’s a high-volume, high-efficiency shooter with incredible range, who has added a few tricks, like an incredible step-back that allows him to get free after setting up defenders off drives.
He hit career-highs in minutes per game (28.4), field goal attempts (10.8), 3-pointers made (3.2) and attempted (7.8), 2-point field goal percentage (62%), rebounds (3.8) and assists (3.5).
There's no denying Pritchard is coming off the best season of his career.
“His competitive nature, his ability to help us on both ends of the floor, he's a guy that you know what you’re getting from him on both ends of the floor,” Mazzulla said earlier this season. “He’s been great for us.”
Now he’s going to have to get even better. The Celtics will likely have to rely on Pritchard even more this upcoming season as they try to squeeze one more year of true contention out of this group. We don’t know what the final roster will look like, so we don’t know if Stevens will be able to extract some starter-level talent out of teams in this summer makeover. But there's no doubt Pritchard will have to do more for this group. For Pritchard, there is added motivation to get back to where the team was.
“You got knocked off. Now it's time to work, to get back there,” Pritchard said. “I don't feel like it's all, ‘we've won our ring. I'm a champion.’ Yes, I have that on my name. But I would like to experience that, achieve that success again. I personally will do everything in my power to help the team accomplish that again.”
Pritchard is notorious for his summer workouts. He has paid pros from other leagues to guard him so he can figure out how to grow his game. That has resulted in perfecting bump-and-finish drives to the rim against bigger players. It has helped him develop that step-back. But the playoffs showed that the offensive work isn’t enough, and that he’ll still need to find more to give defensively.
No matter how much work Pritchard puts in, he’s always going to be just over six feet tall. That means he has to develop something more defensively to be a pest around bigger players. He has to find another level to his game to give Boston a stronger defensive backcourt, especially if they take hits to the center position.
Any loss in rim protection will mean a lot more pressure on perimeter defenders to keep ball handlers from penetrating. If Pritchard is going to be what the team, the fans, and he himself want him to be, there's even more work to be done by one of the hardest workers in the league. That competitive nature Mazzulla keeps talking about is going to have to work overtime.
For Pritchard, the loss might be enough to fuel that fire.
“I don't look at any situation like that as a failure. Failure is only when you stop trying to compete for something,” he said. “So for me, the summer, it's going back and attacking out everything that I can get better at, be in better shape, add a couple more things to my game and elevate myself. Feel like I'm on the right path, and I'll continue that, and I will be a better player next year.”
