Boston Celtics second-year forward Grant Williams recently made an appearance on the “Goodman and Ryan” podcast to talk the upcoming season, his rookie year and more.
Before long, talk naturally landed on the topic of the new cohort of rookies coming to the team from the 2020 NBA draft.
Williams has famously been playing board games with first-year prospects Aaron Nesmith and Payton Pritchard, a forward out of Vanderbilt and a point guard out of Oregon, respectively, with the latter already taking issue with the Tennessee product’s portrayal of their success rate.
Asked by the duo of journalists if he’d known Pritchard in particular before he was drafted by the Celtics in November, Williams confirmed he in fact had not.
“I didn’t actually, but we both are nerds,” he explained. “We both enjoy the same like board games and card games, hanging out. So when he first got drafted, the first day was here, we played Catan together.”
A bonus of being the unofficial team liaison is that you get to help acclimate new players, and it seems Williams was already trying to mold the roster into a more Catan-friendly team, a board game popular with the nerdier set.
“This is big time,” Williams suggested.
“So, actually we taught Aaron how to play. He was willing to learn and we’re probably going to teach Tacko [Fall] and Carson [Edwards] and a couple others, so we actually might have a new and improved roster, let’s just say when it comes to Catan.”
The former Vol managed to find other affinities between himself and the new arrivals as well.
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— The Celtics Wire (@TheCelticsWire) December 1, 2020
“We’re very much nerds,” he added. “I feel like Aaron’s more of a music person — Aaron and I connected that way — and then Pay (as Pritchard is evidently being called) in our board board games.”
“Carson and Peyton knew each other from [Team USA U19], and they were hanging they were originally about to hang out. We were like, hey, let’s all just do it in the group. And we hung out together, played cards, got food and talked … about the next how the season will go and what it’s like being a rookie, gave them a [few] little pointers.”
“They’re some great guys so I’m excited to see what they have moving forward, especially with training camp coming around the corner,” said Williams.
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— The Celtics Wire (@TheCelticsWire) December 2, 2020
And with their first game of a two-contest preseason schedule now less than two weeks away on Dec. 15.
With a roster crunch that should open a shot a meaningful minutes early in the season, the Celtics will need more help than usually expected from rookies on teams with a shot at contention, so the Tennessee product’s interest is likely more than passing curiosity.
It’s probably more of the shooting and scoring type (pun intended).
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