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Boston Celtics: Benched guard expected to remain on Cs past trade deadline

By Andrew Hughes

The Boston Celtics are expected to keep a guard whose minutes have fallen off significantly this season past the trade deadline (Photo by Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)
The Boston Celtics are expected to keep a guard whose minutes have fallen off significantly this season past the trade deadline (Photo by Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images) /
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For those worried that the Boston Celtics will be giving up on a third-year guard whose minutes have fallen off during the 2022-23 season, no need to any longer — MassLive’s Brian Robb has relayed intel that points toward Payton Pritchard remaining in Cs green past the upcoming February 9 trade deadline.

Robb shared the direction the team is likely to go during his latest Celtics mailbag, answering a question from a reader about whether Brad Stevens and the rest of the front office could flip the 2020 first-round draft pick for a 3-and-D wing at the deadline.

According to Robb, Pritchard would be too high or too low of a price to pay for any of the available targets that Boston could use him in pursuit of:

"“My hunch right now on Pritchard is that they hold onto him for depth purposes since I don’t think he will be able to get them anything that helps the roster much in the present. A useful wing will be tough to come by in this trade market and will take more than Pritchard to land. A big will be in play but Boston will probably use other assets to try to land him rather than Pritchard.”"

Teams that could negotiate with the Boston Celtics for Payton Pritchard

We’ve heard the Golden State Warriors — who the Boston Celtics defeated on January 19 in one of the 2022-23 NBA regular season’s most memorable games — are a potential suitor for Payton Pritchard, but negotiating with a team that is a burgeoning rival based on last year’s Finals results and the trash talk Draymond Green has levied towards the Cs doesn’t seem all that likely.

Playoff contenders are said to be interested in Pritchard, but a team that isn’t currently in the postseason picture that could pose as a potential trade partner is the Minnesota Timberwolves. After trading for Rudy Gobert this past offseason, the Wolves were expected to make a leap this season after last season’s first-round elimination — and that hasn’t happened in the slightest with Minnesota currently sporting a losing record. There is one intriguing swap that trading Pritchard could be worth it for, and that is for stretch big man Jaden McDaniels.

McDaniels has started in all 44 games he’s appeared in this season and is converting at a 40% clip from beyond the arc. The price of Pritchard and a future first could potentially get it done, but that might be too steep of a price for someone not guaranteed to start for Boston.

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