Payton Pritchard and Derrick White were two of the NBA’s most prolific 3-point shooters last season.
Eight games into this season, they’ve been two of the worst.
Among 178 qualified shooters league-wide, Pritchard’s 21.3% success rate from beyond the arc (13-for-61) ranked dead last as of Tuesday. White wasn’t far ahead, ranking 171st at 26.3% (20-for-76).
Their struggles have dragged the Celtics’ overall 3-point field-goal percentage —10th-best in the league last season — into the basement. Only the Indiana Pacers have made threes at a lower rate than Boston’s 31.2%.
“It’s tough, especially when you feel like you’re getting good looks,” White said after Monday night’s 105-103 home loss to the Utah Jazz. “I think for a lot of us, we feel like we’re getting good looks, and we keep missing them. It’s frustrating, but it’s part of the game. You’ve got to just keep going.”
The numbers support White’s view. Per NBA player tracking, 88.7% of the Celtics’ 3-point attempts this season have been classified as “open” (closest defender between four and six feet away) or “wide open” (six-plus feet).
So, despite losing the gravity that injured superstar Jayson Tatum creates and no longer employing two high-level outside-shooting bigs in Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford, the Celtics still have found ways to generate quality looks. They’re just not hitting them.
Boston is shooting just 27.0% on open threes (down from 35.0% last season) and 36.1% on wide-open threes (down from 40.7%).
The Utah game was the worst example yet. Fifty of the 51 3-pointers the Celtics launched Monday night were open or wide open, yet they hit just 11 of them — a 21.6% average that was the fourth-worst ever by a Joe Mazzulla-coached Celtics team.
“I think most of them have been (good looks),” Mazzulla said. “Tough shooting night, for sure, but we have to be able to knock down shots.”
White — who admitted he played “sh—y” in the loss — made his first 3-pointer, then missed five straight before hitting two in the fourth quarter as part of an unsuccessful Celtics comeback. Pritchard started 3-for-4 from deep, then went 1-for-7.
“I don’t know if you guys watch it, but I’ve just missed some wide-open ones that usually hit,” said Pritchard, who’s been far more effective inside the arc this season (67.3%). “So it’s not like it’s the defense doing something. It’s just maybe I haven’t hit the ones that I usually hit.”
Jaylen Brown and Sam Hauser, the team’s steadiest 3-point shooters over the first seven games, also struggled, going 0-for-9 and 1-for-8, respectively. Anfernee Simons was 2-for-8.
The only Boston player to hit a three from halftime until the 7:01 mark of the fourth quarter was backup big man Chris Boucher, who made his first in a Celtics uniform late in the third. The rest of the team went 0-for-14 in that 17-minute stretch, during which the Jazz turned a 10-point deficit into an 11-point lead.
“I thought we had a lot of good looks,” said Brown, who scored most of his game-high 36 points on drives and free throws. “We just shot the ball poorly tonight. … We shot a lot of threes. I feel like a lot of them were good looks. A lot of threes I shot, I felt like I was wide open. The shots just didn’t go in tonight for whatever reason. We’ve still got to find ways to win.”
Mazzulla has defended White and Pritchard through their slow shooting starts, pointing out the value they’ve provided as playmakers, defenders and competitors. Both are adjusting to new, expanded roles following Tatum’s Achilles injury and Jrue Holiday’s offseason trade, with Pritchard moving into the starting lineup and White taking on a larger offensive burden.
But the simplest way for Boston to improve its offense — which also ranks 28th in field-goal percentage, 28th in effective field-goal percentage and 27th in true shooting percentage — would be for White and Pritchard to start hitting open threes at the rate they did last season. They did so at a nearly 40% clip in 2024-25 and finished the season ranked fourth and fifth in the NBA in made 3-pointers, respectively, posting the highest and second-highest single-season totals in Celtics history.
Pritchard, who’s been open or wide open on all but three of his 3-point attempts this season, is confident his shooting luck will turn soon.
“It doesn’t bother me one bit,” he said. “I know the tough player I am. Percentages will play out. We’ve got, I don’t know how many more, what, 73 (games), something like that? I’ll have a lot of good shooting days ahead, so I’m not worried about that. So I’m just trying to figure out how to help the team win different ways, and I’ve got to do a better job of that.”