Lessons from the portal cycle for Purdue

The Express Word is GoldandBlack.com’s weekly opinion column, written by Brian Neubert. In today’s edition, we are just going to discuss this week’s transfer portal activity for Purdue basketball.

LESSONS FROM 48 HOURS IN PORTAL-ANDIA

Purdue has lost four players and gained one big one since the season ended.

A few takeaways from a whirlwind week thus far.

Purdue is still operating at a net positive
Adding Oscar Cluff turns this year’s fatal flaw into a strength and goes a long way toward completing what can be a great team next season. The combination of him and Daniel Jacobsen represents the removal of the anvil the Boilermakers had chained to their backs all season. Size is now a strength again. That reality transcends any losses that have occurred. Camden Heide and Myles Colvin each could have really helped Purdue next season, but they were drawn from a position of relative strength while Purdue did as well as it could at the position of greatest need.

Purdue lost two players who likely would not have started next season, undoubtedly central to the reason both departed.

Quality depth may not be unattainable, but may be unretainable.
For the most part, Purdue has done a good job identifying and developing good players who provide value and has often had more of them than it can really use, a good problem to have, right? Well, yeah, until the end of March at least. It’s a thousand times harder to hold on to these guys now than it was just like two years ago, which will cut into teams’ ability to maintain depth and continuity.

Painter has always kind of required a certain mentality of “winning is enough” and openness to sacrificing when it comes to these logjam situations, and that has often proven realistic from November into early March, but as much as players enjoy their teammates and the camaraderie and familiarity and winning, once they leave that locker room for the last time at season’s end, they enter a different world — the real one. There, sentimentality will lose out more often than not to practicality and ambition and at times dollars and cents. Teammates’ voices are quickly replaced by those of their agents and the other schools sliding into their DMs.

You can’t necessarily blame the players for wanting more, because who wouldn’t? Which brings us to this point.

It’s about them, not you or anyone else.
Does this suck for coaches in many cases? Yeah. Does it suck for fans? Sure.

But this is these guys’ careers and lives and they have to do what they feel is best for them and whatever makes their hearts content. It’s nothing personal.

Gicarri Harris’ time is now.
Gicarri Harris ended the season as basically a starter-caliber player for Purdue and there was no way around him affecting Colvin’s outlook next season and maybe in an indirect way, Heide’s, since Cluff presumably pushes Trey Kaufman-Renn to the 4 which could then have pushed Heide into more of a combo forward role after this season proved Heide is best as a 4 man.

If there’s one thing last season reminded us of, it’s that Purdue wants, nay needs, multiple ball-handlers on the floor. While no one wanted to lose Colvin and Heide, the path for Harris and CJ Cox to expand their impact radius now grows.

Yes, impact radius.

I’m gonna put that on T-shirts.

Purdue is a real player in the money game
The mere reality of the portal for at least these few weeks and probably beyond is that’s you’re not getting anyone worth a damn without money. As distasteful as that may be for a lot of people, good for the players. They should have been getting theirs all along.

Purdue just got one of the real gems of this portal cycle and while I doubt that it paid the absurd sums its drunken-sailor peers are throwing around, Purdue stepped up here, which hasn’t really been its recruiting M.O. since the free market took hold here, but is unavoidable now.

Purdue has money and will continue to have money. Will it play the Brewster’s Millions game like its peers? Probably not.

The game is kind of an ugly, soul-less one as every player hits unrestricted free agency every year, but the game is the game and once you’re in it, you’re in it.