Takeaways: Purdue basketball's summer season winds down

There’s just one formal practice remaining for Purdue’s full team for the summer, as Monday morning will be the final session before players get a few weeks off before the fall semester.

International players Omer Mayer and Oscar Cluff will remain on campus and can work with coaches for those two weeks since they were not on campus all summer.

Anyway, following Sunday’s practice, here are a few notes and observations not just from the penultimate summer session, but from the summer as a whole.

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PURDUE IS SHARP, AS IT SHOULD BE

Experience matters. Experience together matters more.

And though there are some newcomers moving into key roles here, you are seeing a pretty smooth product on the floor here, a pretty cohesive unit. The ball moves crisply and decisively, as it should with a team that’s played so much together and with guards as good as Purdue’s. This team all summer has shot the ball very well, which at least in part reflects cohesiveness because players shoot better when they know what to do, where to be and where the ball is coming from and how it’s going to get there.

On-boarding Mayer and Cluff, freshman Antione West and eventually new forward Liam Murphy is important, but the returning core of the roster should be experienced and bonded well enough to be pretty low-maintenance. Great teams coach themselves to a certain extent and Purdue seems to have that capability.

Purdue is going to keep pushing veterans to talk more, but Fletcher Loyer really stands out in that area and it’s a very positive thing when Braden Smith wanders over to the sideline between reps to talk Mayer through whatever was just run.

BIG MEN TRANSFORM PURDUE

The Boilermakers go from prohibitively small last season to again being filthy rich at center, where Cluff arrives and towering sophomore Daniel Jacobsen returns from injury.

Purdue now has credible rim protection and, more importantly, real defensive rebounding punch, transformative elements for a team that was good last season but flawed. Yesterday’s flaws, though, might be today’s strengths.

But there are some things to iron out.

With All-American Trey Kaufman-Renn now likely to play forward primarily instead of center, Purdue will again have to manage spacing, but also find advantages in now being abundantly big. This being a ball-screen-oriented offense built for Braden Smith, keeping congestion to a minimum is going to matter.

Purdue spent more time Sunday working on flip-up-dunk scenarios than perhaps ever, leveraging Kaufman-Renn’s short-roll gravity to set him to throw lobs to 5 men diving to the basket.

Cluff and Jacobsen may get a lot of high-percentage opportunities at the rim, and this team is going to be exponentially more effective finishing on the interior than last year’s was.

GICARRI HARRIS HAS REALLY EMERGED

The sophomore guard/wing has enjoyed an emergent summer by every account, seemingly gushing with confidence after he played a key role for the Boilermakers last season, he and classmate CJ Cox alike.

Harris was a 40-plus-percent three-point shooter in Big Ten play last season and seems to have picked up on the practice floor where he left off — for whatever the summer is worth in that regard — but has also been really solid and assertive off the dribble, and that says nothing of the area where he (and Cox) probably matters more: Defense. Bear in mind, Purdue is mostly going to have one of the sophomores guarding the ball to take that off Braden Smith‘s plate, and both can excellent defensive players.

Unburdening this team’s three best players is going to be a real theme for Purdue this season (a topic we’ll explore later in the week) and a Year 2 jump from Harris would really matter in the backcourt now, but also set him up for a great outlook for Purdue thereafter.

PURDUE WANTS JACK BENTER ON THE FLOOR, SOMEWHERE

Fletcher Loyer might be the best shooter in college basketball. There have been days all summer, though, maybe all season last year, as well, where it looked like Purdue might have a couple candidates for that title. That’s overstatement, but Purdue has gushed all off-season about redshirt freshman Jack Benter, and suggested big things ahead for him through both its personnel decisions in the short term and recruiting decisions for the long term.

Look, newcomer Liam Murphy has been out all summer recovering from shoulder surgery, certainly part of the calculus behind Painter trying Benter at the 4. But Purdue just wanting to find him minutes anywhere they can be found is part of it, too. The wing is loaded and the backcourt stacked, so Benter spent the summer playing mostly forward, where Purdue needs a backup to Trey Kaufman-Renn. (Sophomore Raleigh Burgess missed the whole summer, too, and will encounter the redshirt topic again eventually after several years of dealing with injury.)

But wherever it may be, Purdue is planning on a bigger, stronger and infinitely offensively skilled Benter being in its rotation, it seems like. After a modest summer growth spurt, the redshirt freshman doesn’t look like a freshman anymore.