Takeaways: Friday in Providence before Purdue's NCAA Tournament meeting with McNeese State

PURDUE NEEDS TO KEEP IT UP ON DEFENSE

Purdue needed to recapture its best on defense before the NCAA Tournament. To do that, coaches A) gave their players considerable rest and B) used film from earlier in the season when Purdue was one of the better defensive teams in college basketball to remind players of what they were capable of.

“We just told guys, ‘When you just do the best job you can do, that’s good enough for Purdue,'” assistant coach Paul Lusk said.

The result, an excellent defensive game vs. High Point and a foundation to maybe make a run in this tournament.

“I enjoy that,” Trey Kaufman-Renn said. “The way Coach Painter recruits here, he recruits perfectionists. Sometimes you focus on the negatives, what you have to get better at. Sometimes it’s good to just watch (yourself) playing well, making shots or whatever it might be.”

It wasn’t just January film. Purdue went all the way back to the Alabama game for reference material.

“We made mistakes (then),” Lusk said. “But we were flying around.”

The High Point game was a glimpse again of what Purdue has been capable of this season, but incapable of recapturing and sustaining during the final weeks of the season.

Now, maybe things have turned back in the right direction at the perfect time.

There was more energy and urgency on the defensive end.

“The stakes are higher,” Braden Smith said. “Understanding this could be our last game definitely played a part.”

READY TO BE CHALLENGED

A term that came up in relation to McNeese’s defense and offensive rebounding: “Relentless.” And not unlike High Point, the Cowboys have a wealth of length and athleticism.

McNeese sucker-punched Clemson with a 2-3 zone it hadn’t played all year, but weaved between zone and its traditional man defense and its frenzied switching.

“We would be called a bunch of idiots if it didn’t work,” McNeese coach Will Wade said, “so I’m glad it worked.”

Regardless of their scheme, the Cowboys are highly turnover-minded and really aggressive on the offensive glass.

“That’s one thing that we’ve challenged ourselves, making sure everyone is on the same page, everyone knows what they’re doing, doing their job before and after a shot goes up,” said Camden Heide, coming off a double-double Thursday night. “Because there’s a lot of different things that can go wrong, especially if one person is not doing their job. Preparing for a team that has a lot of different defenses, it just goes to our coaches and how smart they are and the game plan that they put together for us offensively.”

Purdue will see a lot of different things.

“If you throw Matt Painter and Purdue fastballs the entire game, they’re going to hit some grand slams,” said Wade, who’ll be on his way to N.C. State at season’s end. “They’re too good a staff and team. You have to throw some change-ups, some curves.

“We watched a bunch of film. It’s a lot of stuff we have seen, just have to have a greatest hits of some of the stuff that’s worked against them this year, but they’ll be prepared. They’re very, very well-coached.”

SURGING OPPONENTS

The thing with these one-bid league opponents is they usually enter the NCAA having just run roughshod over their low-major leagues. High Point came in having won 14 in a row; McNeese hasn’t lost since

“We didn’t just start preparing when we went on the winning streak. We prepared for this all summer,” McNeese’s Quadir Copeland said. “That’s what people don’t realize. This is a moment we prepared for when we all stepped on campus in June or July. Whenever we stepped on campus, we have been preparing for this moment. Of course we enjoyed this moment, but this is something we planned to do. This is a goal we planned to achieve, so locked in on it.”

Painter said of High Point that normally when teams have dominated their conferences and entered the postseason on extended winning streaks — especially in higher-stakes environments in one-bid leagues — they normally have a competitive “edge” to them that has to be matched.

“It really doesn’t matter what your seed is, they’re a great team,” Painter said. “Look at them like you’re playing Auburn. Look at them like you’re playing Michigan State. They have great players. They have a great coach. They gained some steam here and that’s the narrative, but when the game starts, the game is still the game and they play hard. So look at them for what they do and make sure you’re selling that to your players about how quick they are, athletic they are, how tough they are, how they get into gaps. It’s just making a clip tape.”