Express Word: Revisiting our Purdue hoops predictions

The Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, .

PURDUE PREDICTIONS REVISITED

Every fall, GoldandBlack.com skittishly shares with you its half-baked predictions for the Purdue Basketball season to come, some years turning out better than others. And every year, for the purpose of accountability, we publicly shame ourselves by revisiting those predictions after the season, because anyone can make a prediction …

Anyway, you can read our full 2024-2025 Fearful Predictions from November here.

Some snippets …

• Purdue will win 26 games, earn a 3 seed and get at least as far as the Sweet 16 en route to another credible Final Four shot next season.

Purdue won 24 games, earned a 4 seed and made the Sweet 16.

• Though new West Coast travel will affect the Big Ten race — teams will lose games because of it — and make it as unpredictable as ever, the Boilermakers will earn a share of their third-consecutive regular season conference title.

West Coast travel did cost every contender games, Purdue included, but Purdue did not win the Big Ten.

• Braden Smith will be Big Ten Player-of-the-Year and win the Cousy Award.

But …

His assist numbers, though, will dip from last season’s average of 7.5 not just because of Zach Edey being gone but because of his stats being thinned out by him having to alternate focuses between scoring and facilitating, as you’ve already seen him do to both extremes this season, from 31 points at Creighton to 15 assists vs. Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

Definitely overthought this one and figured Trey Kaufman-Renn‘s more-methodical ways as an offensive finisher would expose Smith’s stats to some inconsistent official scoring, especially on the road. And the scoring part of it, but that line of thinking was just wrong.

Smith’s assists increased. A lot. By more than a full assist.

• Matt Painter will keep Easter-egging good-natured, harmless profanity into his post-game press conferences, a reflection of a coach as comfortable with his place in the world as anyone in college basketball.

• Kaufman-Renn and Daniel Jacobsen will be carrying most of the minutes at center by the end of the season.

Incomplete. Any prediction made involving Jacobsen went to the dumpster pretty quick, but had he stayed healthy this absolutely would have been the case. Kaufman-Renn did carry the overwhelming majority of the 5-man minutes.

• Fletcher Loyer and Smith will be deadlocked all season behind Kaufman-Renn in scoring column, but Loyer will get around 13 a game on roughly the same three-point shooting he shot overall (44.4 percent) last season. His overall field goal percentage will jump from 41.6 to around 45 and his assists will spike.

Smith averaged nearly 16 per game and Loyer nearly 14 while TKR did lead the team in scoring by a wide margin, which was a no-brainer prediction to make. Loyer did exceed the 45-percent mark and his three-point shooting did stay the exact same from a percent perspective.

One Bold Prediction For 2025

Realizing now that this makes for incredibly boring content and comes off as off-putting self-serving media wonkery, GoldandBlack.com will spend more than last season’s 15 minutes compiling these predictions. There’s way too much low-hanging fruit here. We will work diligently these next few months, starting now, to make as many wrong predictions as possible next year, simply to make this annual audit more compelling.

ON PRESEASON PURDUE HYPE

Yes, this all may be coming together perfectly for Purdue to make another Final Four run for a season in which the run to the Final Four is like 60 miles.

But understand, too, that while Purdue should benefit from the college game getting younger without COVID seniors everywhere and continuity everywhere more scarce, this will be more of a reinvention season than it might seem, because Purdue will be introducing real guys as newcomers to an established team. That went swimmingly with Lance Jones, but that was one guy, and he was an exception, not a rule.

Moreover, last year’s Purdue team had a really special undercurrent to it. It was mad as hell and it wasn’t gonna take it anymore, so when people kissed their collective you-know-whats in the media or out on the town, none of it mattered.

This team’s best players have been there. They couldn’t finish the job, but they got there. This is not a collection of personalities prone to contentedness, but it hasn’t been shamed, either. There’s no real apparent redemption arc, if one would be needed. Should it? Not necessarily. But it’s what worked before. And Zach Edey’s machine-ish relentlessness helped, too.

Anyway, I’m just saying that next season is just like last season: Purdue’s standard shouldn’t be its non-conference schedule or its Big Ten competition. It is the very best version of itself. The standard should be greatness.

That can’t possibly be an easily attainable standard. Last time Purdue met it, it had some dynamics helping it along that may or may not be replicable.

RANDOM THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• I don’t know for absolute certain if Purdue is going to add international help to next year’s team or not, but if it does, is there better alignment possible than the sort of skill and maturity and professionalism that normally comes from across the pond and Purdue? It’s almost like they’re made for one another.

• I am interested to see what Purdue football might be able to do with a legitimate quarterback running game and personnel suited to do it.

There are just very basic pillars of football that Purdue just hasn’t grasped under its past hundred or so coaches that this staff could really stand to assuage, some of which — red-zone offense, short-yardage running game and turnover differential — can align with having a real quarterback-focused layer to its run game.

• The House case is going to pass but the longer they take to iron out some of the imperfections at issue, the better. Namely, they’ve got to make transition as painless as possible and not rip current athletes off their teams or off their scholarships. Too often it gets lost in the ether that the whole point of this is to provide opportunity, not take it away.

This is a court thing, not an NCAA thing, but if a whole generation of college athletes could get a blanket coupon for 25 percent of their eligibility back because there was a pandemic, why can’t a basketball player on a roster, with a uniform, right now, stay on that team through the conclusion of their eligibility?