A season ago, Purdue basketball was watching the NCAA men’s basketball national championship game in West Lafayette.
This season, the Boilermakers find themselves in the national championship game tonight in Phoenix, as Purdue basketball will take on UConn. While a year can make a difference, the Boilermakers admit they’ve learned plenty of lessons to put themselves in a favorable position tonight.
The lessons have come with a price, however.
For the last three seasons, Purdue basketball fell to double digit seeds much earlier than anticipated, including last year’s first round debacle against 16th seed Fairleigh Dickinson.
What would happen after that loss set the stage for this year’s improbable run, according to Purdue basketball coach Matt Painter.
“It sure helped when Zach (Edey) came back,” Painter said. “All these guys have played so hard, worked on their game and put a lot of time into it. And we had to sit in it. We had to take it. Sometimes when you sit in it, and you’re honest with yourselves and you take it, some great things can happen.”
After “sitting in it,” Purdue has a chance to do something that has only happened once — lose in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to a 16 seed and win the whole thing the following year. That was done by Virginia in 2019 after its first round loss in 2018.
Painter admitted he has taken some lessons from Virginia’s run and applied them to this year’s Purdue basketball season.
“I think it’s actually an accurate narrative,” Painter said Sunday. “Sometimes people will pick up narratives out of thin air instead of doing their work. This is actually the right narrative. The thing I grab from it more than anything is just the humility of (Virginia coach) Tony Bennett and how he handled it with class. I think anytime you can take it, you’ve got to be able to take it, right? When you’re a little kid, that was always the line, ‘you can dish it out but you can’t take it, right? We’re all that way as young people. We can say whatever we want, then it hurts when it comes back your way.
“I used that with a positive spin. More than anything, what stood out to me was when we had that loss, we joined that club with Virginia and Tony Bennett. He had just gotten beat by Furman that day. You’re at a low when you have tough losses like that, but for him to think of us and to think of me and to reach out to me on that day, that was great. So from just a humanity standpoint, there are some good people out there that are thinking about others even when they’re down and out themselves. Once again, it’s not who you are, right? It’s what you do for a living. Try to keep that in perspective.”
Painter said the problem with last year’s loss was Purdue basketball could not get back on the court right away.
“The problem with a really tough loss when it ends your season is you don’t have another game,” Painter said. “Like when you blow a game on Jan.16, you just play on Jan. 21 and you get that taste out of your mouth. But when you have a loss at the end of the season, you have to sit on it, you have to take it.”
Purdue basketball had no choice but to improve
Painter said a combination of self reflection and improvement helped propel Purdue basketball this season.
Everyone on the team has gotten better, including standouts Zach Edey and Braden Smith. In addition, the Boilermakers benefited from the addition of Lance Jones, who transferred in weeks after the loss to FDU.
“You just try to keep working, try to be honest about your mistakes, try to be honest about just
everything,” Painter said. “It’s an inexact science at times, especially from a recruiting standpoint.
You learn from your tough losses and don’t run from them. You face them, and that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve been to that second weekend a lot, but we haven’t been able to get through it. We only got to the Elite Eight once before this. You just keep plugging and feel good about what you’re doing, feel good about your convictions. When it gets right down to the game, our tough losses the last four years, if you don’t turn the basketball over, don’t go 4-for-22 from three, or whatever those numbers are, you win. But I know this. If we don’t turn the basketball over and we still go 4-for-22, whatever those numbers exactly are, we’re probably going to win those games. Like last night — (a 63-50 win over N.C. State) — was an outlier game for us. We had high-level turnovers, but we went 10-for-25 from three. We still established Zach Edey. It wasn’t an unbelievable game for him, but those numbers are very average for him, and not average for everybody else. We stayed functional in what we were doing.”
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