Upward mobility in the NBA contract market is quite rare. The financial fate of players is often tied to where they are drawn. Where that player is often accomplished, he runs out of opportunities in his career, which in turn determines his rookie extension, what he chooses in his next trade, and so on. One girlfriend’s contract tends to spawn many, and nowhere is that more true than Payton Pritchard.
On Tuesday, he and the Boston Celtics agreed to a two-year, $44.2 million contract extension, according to ESPN. All told, he’s expected to earn around $85 million in the NBA over the first 10 seasons of his career. That’s not a bad outcome, on paper, with No. 26 pick in the 2020 NBA Draft. Just consider that in comparison to the No. 4 pick, Patrick Williams, who has pocketed more than $130 million in his career so far.
Williams was by no means a better NBA player than Pritchard. He is now a fringe rotation player for the Chicago Bulls, a lottery team. But he was a high draft pick with big physical tools that tended to pay off players. He played for a Chicago team that, due to his poor management, had few other players available, so the Bulls gave him a bloated free agent contract, a bet that was not forthcoming.
Pritchard did almost exactly the opposite of things. He exposed a loaded Celtic team that couldn’t find consistent minutes for him. Things got bad enough around the 2023 trade deadline that Pritchard wanted to be dealt. Without much of a resume after three years, the Celtics locked him up for a four-year, $30 million rookie extension that provided him with life-changing assets, but still represented a pittance compared to what he was actually worth. He won the Sixth Year and the championship before the extension also kicked m.
Normally, a standard extension can give a veteran player 40% of his current deal at the end of the season. This is because they contract the old material. If the team believes in you when you’re young, it makes you eligible for more stretches when you’re auditioned. However, Pritchard’s deal is so low that it actually caps another figure: 140% of an estimated average player’s salary in the first year of the extension. So he could only extend it by about $67 million over three years. He would wound up taking the equivalent of a shorter two-year deal with a mutual option that gives the sides flexibility to opt out of the contract and renegotiate something bigger in the 2029 offseason.
These deals, by analytical standards, are fairly significant deals.
Could Pritchard have been better on the sidelines?
Stephen Noh has built a Sporting News tool that determines a player’s projected value using DPM as an all-in-one metric. Pritchard is projected to make around $28 million next year and move forward. This deal keeps him in Boston for an average of $22 million a year.
These projections are based on who Pritchard already was. It’s surprising that Jaylen Brown, who would soon become Pritchard, was traded. As Yahoo’s Tom Haberstroh noted after the Brown trade, Pritchard’s usage rate went up nearly nine percentage points since he played without Brown a year ago … and his true shooting improved by four percentage points in those minutes. The Celtics went 32-5 in games in which Pritchard used 22% or more last season.
Pritchard was never a full-time starter. This will be the opportunity of the season, and if it is, he’s suddenly on the roster for shots and minutes he’s never had. Some, like Haberstroh, have even suggested he’s ready for a Jalen Brunson-esque jump as a small guard finally given the freedom to spread his wings. While such notions are probably somewhat optimistic, it is not unreasonable to believe that Pritchard is headed for his most productive NBA season.
And if he is, the Celtics will still have three years of cost control on a heavily valued player during this stretch. If he opts out of his 2029 deal through the mutual option, they will have leverage together again. After all, mutual options require both parties to choose. If the Celtics simply want to deal with Pritchard this part of 2029-30, they can.
Every team in the NBA would rather have high draft picks than low ones. The top of the draft is typically where the superstars are found, and even if the superstars cost more, it’s a prerequisite for championship contention. I know that chat. Just look at the success of Brown and Jayson Tatum.
But Pritchard’s contract is just an example of how much excess value can be generated by attaching a peg later on in the scheme. Those are the players who are usually overlooked in the second contract, which drops down to the third and fourth.
In an NBA increasingly obsessed with all-time greats, success stories like Boston’s with Pritchard are becoming almost as essential to true championship contention as the Stars have always been.