Takeaways/Wrap video—Auburn
BIRMINGHAM — Our post-game analysis following 16th-ranked Purdue’s 87-69 to No. 2 Auburn Saturday at the Battle In Birmingham.
PDF: Purdue-Auburn stats
ON THE SCHEDULE
Purdue moved up a weight class in college basketball the past few years and has long scheduled as such.
But here’s the rub: The programs Purdue now shares airspace with really don’t slip. They lose All-Americans and pros and they just go get different ones, no problem. It’s why they have the same teams every year, the way you just go to the store and buy the same cereal every week.
Purdue built a series of great teams via a years-long process, not on-the-fly transactions. It was bound to run into some glaring deficiencies at some point.
Does this Purdue team have glaring deficiencies or does this Purdue team have glaring deficiencies against this type of schedule? Or just a certain type of team.
It’s probably the latter scenarios, but we shall see.
Purdue is 8-4, but the likeliest truth here — yes that’s a contradictory phrase — is that Purdue is still really good and will win a ton of games and maybe win championships this season, but this schedule was just too much before the door even closed behind Zach Edey.
The losses have be shown to be worth it. When judgment day comes in March, the strength of schedule has to make up for a win total that won’t be maxed out — Purdue does have two really good non-conference wins and some respectable filler — but more importantly, these losses now have to improve the product enough to lead to wins later. Then, it will have been worth it.
PHYSICALITY, AGAIN
Purdue isn’t going to bully anyone now the way it did before. In that sense, it just has to make up the difference with effort and energy.
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But even then, like the past two games, there will be days when even that may not change everything.
The teams Purdue has lost to are all physically developed, long, strong, and most importantly, old.
They are swapping out grown men for grown men every year and just rolling right along.
Yes, Purdue could play the game and go portal-heavy, but it would be pretty idiotic, frankly, to second-guess Matt Painter’s approach when Purdue is still riding the greatest five-year run in school history and just had the grownest of all grown men win player-of-the-year two years straight.
But this was gonna catch up to them at some point.
And it is right now, but only in games like this.
The possibility genuinely exists here that Purdue comes out of break like a New Year’s firework and reels off a bunch of wins to restart Big Ten play. And the possibility genuinely exists that Auburn wins the national title, because that team is UConn good.
PURDUE’S FRESHMEN
Not a single point Purdue scored in the final 30 minutes mattered one bit, but if you’re squinting so hard that you actually hurt yourself looking for positives, then you might see something in the confidence maybe freshmen can take from garbage-time. CJ Cox scored 16 points, Gicarri Harris made a three and Raleigh Burgess flashed at times.
None of it mattered all that much but even the littlest of things can matter to young players when the basketball world in front of them is still so big.
Keep in mind, this was a road game, neutral in name only. Productivity in an environment like this will help them.
