Ready or not, Purdue freshman guards Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer will be thrust to forefront

There’s no telling how Braden Smith‘s and Fletcher Loyer‘s respective freshman seasons at Purdue — starting, kind of, Wednesday evening with an exhibition against Truman State — will ultimately play out. There is reason to believe, however, that neither of the rookie guards will be all that shaken by the ups and downs of being young in the Big Ten and having the ball in their hands a lot.

From their first day on campus this summer, Smith and Loyer have been lauded for their confidence, the self-assured demeanors that don’t always come easily for those straight out of high school as they ascend to the highest level of competition they’ve seen, with the most information to process that they’ve ever seen.

For a player in Smith’s position, that transition would be hard enough, point guard being as challenging a position to play right away as any, if not more so, both physically and mentally. But there are other layers for Smith. He was idled — physically, at least — this summer as he recovered from foot surgery, so his learning right away had to come from just watching and listening as opposed to doing.

Now, Smith is really Purdue’s only natural point guard. Others will play the position, but really in name only. Smith is it. That in mind, the challenge of solidifying Purdue’s most-unknown position lies mostly with him.

His decision-making becomes central to Purdue’s success, as he knows, too, that some of the tricks that made him a high school star may not fly in college. The undercurrent, too, to his adjustment to Purdue’s offense lies in his mastery of the “800 plays” he joked of Purdue having and his transition to playing with a highly influential, focal-point sort of big man for the first time in his career.

That’s considerable responsibility, but a moment he seems to not just be walking into, but strutting into.

“It’s just confidence and how I carry myself,” Smith said. “That’s just how I’m wired, who I am. I’m going to play my hardest. I’m not the tallest guy on the court, but I’m going to play my hardest and hopefully it works out.”

Smith’s confidence is overt, unmistakable. It’s what people mean when they use the term “swagger.”

Loyer is different. His confidence is the quiet sort, almost a smugness, the sort of thing that tends to trigger road crowds in the Big Ten, especially when that player happens to be an elite jump-shooter and high-end scorers, which Loyer may very well turn out to be at Purdue.

He, too, has been unflappable, by every account, since he arrived at Purdue and carried himself in a way that belies his age and experience level.

“Just growing up around basketball, you know guys have tough shooting nights, but you have to move on,” Loyer said. “… It’s about not falling down on bad days and on good days, just knowing that I have to come back and do it again the next day.”

That’s the common denominator between Purdue’s two freshman guards. As different as they may be as players and people, they both essentially grew up with the proverbial basketball in their hands, sons of coaches, not just their fathers, but mothers as well.

Coaches’ kids have tended to do well at Purdue under Matt Painter and he’ll need more of the same this season, as you could make the case that as dominant as Zach Edey can be and as stacked as Purdue’s frontcourt might prove to be, a team is only as good as its guards, and Painter’s two starters (based off the Cincinnati scrimmage) are green as can be.

Knowing this, on Day 1 of practice last month, Painter and his staff ran heavy press-offense work, more so than they likely would have otherwise. (It didn’t hurt that Edey wasn’t practicing that day, freeing some time they’d spend working on throwing the ball to him.) There was some work in-bounding against pressure, as well; that too has been a preseason-long emphasis for Purdue.

The reason: Purdue knows opponents are going to test Smith and Loyer. Youth has that effect, as does the fact that Smith isn’t particularly tall and Loyer isn’t particularly physically strong at this young stage of his career.

Both freshmen know what’s coming.

“It’s not going to be easy, especially playing in the Big Ten,” Loyer said, “but coming from high school when you had two, maybe three, guys guarding you, that helps a little bit, knowing how to get catches, how to get guys off you. It’s just about playing how we know how to play, how to get open and doing what we need to do when guys are pressuring us, which they probably will be.”

Painter figures to have two foundational players for years to come here; in the moment, though, his concerns have lied solely in the freshman guards’ lack of experience.

“They just need to play,” Painter said. “They just need to get out there and have different experiences and face different people that’ll give them different problems. When you see different styles, it gives everybody different problems and you have to be able to adjust to that. Hopefully through scouting we can help both of them with that.

“But both of them are sure of themselves and competitive that’s a good place to start.”