On April 29, 1970, Dave DeBusschere of the New York Knicks hit a jump shot from the circle with three seconds left to give his team a 102-100 lead over the Los Angeles Lakers in the third game of the NBA Finals. LA’s Wilt Chamberlain inbounded the ball immediately to guard Jerry West. His first dribble was a feint to the left. West then cut back toward the middle of the court and let fly from 60 feet, over, I think, Dick Barnett. (The video looks like it was shot underwater on Mars.) On the video of the shot, the sound in the arena almost cuts out entirely until the ball goes through the net to force overtime—at the end of which, I would point out, the Lakers lost anyway.
It is probably as iconic a basket as was ever scored in the NBA, not only because it was scored by a certifiable NBA legend, but also because the shot was … a shot. It was not a heave. It was not a “desperation toss,” as Gene Hackman warned his Hickory Huskers against in the Sectional Finals against Linton. It was not some kind of baseball pass aimed roughly at the area code in which the basket is located. There was nothing freaky about it.
You see West elude the first defender, moving with strength and purpose. Then you see him square up on the fly, just as though he was pulling up for a midrange jumper. The follow-through is perfect. West knew precisely what he was doing. He was taking a shot.
Breathes there a person with a soul so dead that they haven’t tried one, usually the first time on a strange court. For myself, my preferred mid-court choice is a two-handed set shot. This is because I first learned my basketball from an ancient textbook written by Nat Holman, the legendary Hall of Fame coach at City College of New York, where his 1950 team became the only one ever to win the NCAA and NIT tournaments in the same season. Of course, his career came a’cropper when players on his 1951 squad were arrested as part of a national point-shaving scandal. At the end of his life, Holman adopted a British accent, despite having grown up on the Lower East Side on New York.
Anyway, Nat’s book, illustrated by still photos showing each part of the two-hand set’s mechanics. This turned my own shot somewhat robotic, until I got the hang of it. What I remember most is Nat’s insistence that your hands should finish high, I have never stepped onto a basketball court for the first time without Nat Holman’s words ringing in my head as I stepped up to the midcourt line. This includes the old Boston Garden, where my mechanics went completely haywire and the ball went sailing off to the right and my biceps felt like I’d been driving railroad spikes with them. I could almost hear Nat Holman vomiting in the Beyond. I was no Payton Pritchard.
Buzzcut and square-jawed, he looks like a yob from the Old Colony Houses in South Boston. Put a scally cap and a leather jacket on him, and the FBI would have signed him up as a CI on the spot. Payton Pritchard has become a genuine phenomenon off the bench for the Boston Celtics, who suddenly look like the deepest defending NBA championship team since John Havlicek was the sixth man for the Russell Celtics teams of the 1960s. (It is fair to say that, with Frank Ramsey, who preceded Havlicek, the Celtics invented the role of sixth man.) Last Wednesday night against the Portland Trail Blazers, however, Pritchard went into orbit.
He scored 43 points, hitting 10 three-point shots. Teammate Derrick White put up 41, also with nine threes, which made the pair the first Celtics teammates ever to score 40-plus points in the same game. “Me and P were talking about it, and it was kind of crazy like, we weren’t even hitting the rim, just swishes,” White told the Boston Globe. Pritchard, meanwhile, was being dunked and doused by his teammates. Jaylen Brown tossed a shoe at him, Ahhh, teammates.
Before his recent transformation into gen-u-wine Allen Iverson, Pritchard already was a YouTube star because of his extraordinary gift for buzzer-beating long-range ordnance. Most notable was Pritchard’s performance in last year’s NBA Finals. First, he closed out the third quarter of Game 2 with a 35-footer. Then in Game 5, he took off from his own side of the court and, 50 feet later, the ball had gone through, Mike Breen had achieved escape velocity at the mic, and Jayson Tatum had come all the way from the other side of the court to chest-bump Pritchard into the first row of seats.
Again, the remarkable thing about all of these moments is that Pritchard is taking shots from distance. He finds an opening, or creates one off the dribble in transition, sets his feet, squares up, and shoots. In many of his other buzzer-beaters, he pulls up at around 30-35 feet and sinks a very conventional jump shot.
Pritchard didn’t arrive in the league on the G-League turnip truck. He had a great college career at Oregon, culminating with his being awarded both the Pac-12 Player of the Year and the Bob Cousy Award as the country’s best point guard. The Celtics took him as the 26th pick in the first round of the 2020 draft. By the end of the 2023 season, however, frustrated by a lack of playing time due to a foot injury and Boston’s acquisition of Malcolm Brogdon, Pritchard openly demanded a trade. Sports Illustrated even floated alleged options for a deal, all of which look fundamentally ridiculous in retrospect. (Jarred Vanderbilt? Nick Richards?) By October, he’d signed a four-year, $30 million deal and never looked back.
Now, he leads a raft of second-line shooters for Joe Mazzulla’s three-happy offense. Besides Pritchard, there is Sam Hauser, who has played (and shot) his way into a new four-year, $45 million deal. Even rookie Baylor Scheierman got a chance at the end of a recent blowout of the hapless 76ers and put up 15, including three triples.
I have long believed that the real genius of Dr. James Naismith was putting his goals off the ground. That meant that, eventually, players would have to go up to them to score, which led us to the airborne game we have today. As the late poet Jim Carroll wrote, “In basketball, you can correct your mistakes immediately and beautifully and in midair.”
And that was the argument I use perpetually against those sticks in the mud who claim that dunking is boring, and who believe that the sum of human experience can be found in the back pick.
Strangely, I’m hearing similar talk about the three-point shot, and it’s just as inane as the criticism of the dunk was. There is a wonderful hush that comes over a crowd as the ball is in the air. You can almost hear a mass intake of breath. If the shot goes in, then the arena explodes. If it doesn’t, everything settles back into the constant dull roar punctuated by the “game presentation” playlist. That wonderful hush is deeper depending on the length of the shot. When Payton Pritchard lets fly these days from the wrong side of the mid-court line, the hush is surprisingly leavened by expectation. It’s going in. You know it is.
