This was before the Friday Nightmare against FDU and was written by Noah Weiland, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of COVID-19. Weiland spent four days on the Purdue campus working on this story.
Purdue Favors Old Basketball Ideas. Will It
Keep Working?
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Zach Edey, the Big Ten men’s basketball player of the year, has grown exhausted, sometimes demoralized, by the focus on his body,...at 7-foot-4 and 305 pounds...
The players on the team are a bundle of nervous anxiety. They had a shrink accompany them on their NCAA trip. Short trip!😂
Edey...picked walking paths around campus that limited encounters with his shorter classmates — “the back alleys, the little side streets,” he said. He skipped football games, where fans would stop him for selfies “every two steps.” He grew wary of leaving his house.
“If I look around, I’m going to look around, I’m going to see everyone kind of staring at me with big eyes”...
As the losses piled up [this season], Edey, whose face adorns soda cups at Mackey Arena and shirts in campus stores, asked staff to excuse him from longer conversations with reporters.
Edey is most comfortable when he is secluded with friends. “They’ll never ask me about my height,” he said.
Purdue's "old ideas" are old and stupid, the product of a stupid coach. It could be called Purdue's Painter Predicament.
Edey is a reluctant sensation on an anachronistic team taking risks that few others at the top of the sport do, rejecting the transfer portal and playing by necessity without N.B.A. lottery picks.
It's "Heat" Culture!
...
Edey...is widely expected to be named the national player of the year...Edey, the lone non-Indiana native in Purdue’s starting lineup, was the 440th-ranked player in his class. ...Edey’s future is uncertain. He is an awkward potential fit in the N.B.A., a league that once valued traditional low-post big men but that now prioritizes lanky wing players.
Yet, NOT a lottery pick. Even an "UNCERTAIN FUTURE"!
A promise from teams that he would be a first-round selection would likely spell his departure from West Lafayette. Still, he conceded that another year at Purdue would help advance his game.
The best college basketball player might have to keep playing college basketball, Painter and other Purdue coaches acknowledged in interviews.
“I think it’ll be close,” Painter said.
The vulnerabilities of the system are apparent...
...Purdue, a No. 1 seed in this N.C.A.A. tournament, has made the round of 16 six times under its coach, Matt Painter, though it has won only one of those games. It has never won a national championship. Last season, the Boilermakers flamed out with a splashy loss to tiny St. Peter’s University...
Over four days on campus as the team prepared for this postseason, players, coaches and administrators spoke candidly about the pressures and anxieties — competitive, social, academic and financial — that come with meeting expectations on their own terms. They open play in the N.C.A.A. tournament on Friday against the No. 16-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson.
Painter, sitting at his cluttered conference room table, said that Purdue was peaking.
Painter, tall and burly with tightly slicked hair...
RILES!
In a basketball-crazed state, Painter is religiously committed to Indiana talent...Four of the team’s five starters and 10 of the roster’s 16 players this season are from Indiana. ...
Purdue is surrounded in both rankings and the N.C.A.A. tournament bracket by teams that have successfully harnessed transfers, plugging them in to partially composed teams.
But Painter said that keeping players from their freshman to their senior years allows him to better project his teams ahead of time and helps his players mature in roles that complement others....
Hunting for hidden gems, Painter relies on personality evaluations called “DiSC assessments,”
which the team’s assistants give to potential recruits. That analysis,
Painter says, helps determine a player’s capacity to be coached.
"HEAT"!!!!!
Painter is defiant about his approach. What if he could have D.J. Wagner, a Kentucky commitment and an N.B.A. prospect considered the top recruit in next year’s class? “I wouldn’t take him," Painter said...
The pressures of college athletics drag on the team. As Purdue’s players relaxed in armchairs in a team meeting room last Tuesday, they talked with Kelsey Dawson, a sports psychologist at the university who is traveling with the team during the N.C.A.A. tournament. Several players confided that they were struggling with their confidence. Many were having trouble sleeping.
Dr. Dawson tried steering them away from their phones and video games. She suggested writing in a journal, drinking tea, making to-do lists and watching television shows they had already seen. One player said he had luck walking around until he felt tired.
...
Purdue runs more than 250 offensive plays organized in around half a dozen categories, an elaborate playbook that players memorize in early morning workouts in the weeks before the season begins.
Painter's an idiot. All of those plays come down to one thing:
The sets have esoteric names that Terry Johnson, an assistant coach, draws on a white board and flashes at his team during games: Horns Blast, G4 Blast, SW7 Point. The core of the team’s strategy is simple and old-fashioned: A pass to the low post to Edey, preferably in his favorite position just beneath and to the left of the basket, where he likes to pivot left for a hook shot, right for a layup, or turn around for a dunk, which requires little elevation.
