102-94 win over the Portland Trail Blazers<\/a> that he\u2019s been nursing an injury to his left (non-shooting) pinky finger since late December.<\/p>\n\u201cI think since probably we played Portland last,\u201d Pritchard said, referring to the Celtics\u2019 road loss to the Blazers on Dec. 28. \u201cSo about a month or maybe a little longer than that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pritchard tweaked the finger late in Monday\u2019s game while competing for a rebound. His hand collided with Portland center Donovan Clingan, causing Pritchard to double over in pain and then exit toward the Celtics locker room.<\/p>\n
The sixth-year pro quickly returned to the bench, then checked back into the game with 41.5 seconds remaining. He was Boston\u2019s leading scorer in the win, scoring 23 points on 8-of-19 shooting (5-of-11 from 3-point range), including two end-of-quarter buzzer-beaters.<\/p>\n
The Celtics outscored the Blazers by 23 points over Pritchard\u2019s 35 minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll be all right,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve been dealing with it, jamming it back and forth. And then you just kind of hit it, and it goes sideways a little bit. But when you play basketball, you deal with finger injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NBA\u2019s Sixth Man of the Year last season, Pritchard was elevated to the starting lineup following Jrue Holiday\u2019s offseason trade to Portland. He\u2019s started 45 of Boston\u2019s 46 games to date, averaging 16.8 points (third-most on the team) and 5.3 assists (second-most) while boasting the NBA\u2019s third-best assist-to-turnover ratio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Payton Pritchard has missed just one game for the Celtics this season. But that doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,75,46,76790,6,405,61602,76789,66831,687,471,3967,1617],"class_list":["post-564335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-portland-trail-blazers","tag-basketball","tag-blazers","tag-boston-celtics","tag-celtics","tag-celtics-blazers","tag-nba","tag-payton-pritchard","tag-payton-pritchard-celtics","tag-payton-pritchard-injury","tag-payton-pritchard-stats","tag-portland","tag-portland-trail-blazers","tag-portlandtrailblazers","tag-trail-blazers"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}