Transcript: Matt Painter, Purdue players discuss McNeese State Friday in Providence

PROVIDENCE — Friday was media day for Purdue at the NCAA Tournament, where the fourth-seeded Boilermakers meet McNeese State Saturday in the Round of 32, with a trip to Indianapolis on the line.

Below is the full NCAA-provided transcript of Matt Painter’s press conference, as well as those of players Myles Colvin and Camden Heide.

PURDUE COACH MATT PAINTER

Q. Matt, just off the court, have you seen Braden, Fletcher and Trey grow and take over leadership this year?

MATT PAINTER: Your leadership and responsibility grows with who we lost more than anything, just being accountable, whether you’re on both ends of the court or off the court, just holding other people accountable. The best way to lead is by example. I think all three of those guys lead in a different way, but they have done a good job growing in that area.

Q. Maybe it’s my untrained eye, but it seems like the last two or three weeks you’ve gone to the offense-defense substitutions more frequently, particularly with Will Berg, Trey Kaufman-Renn, maybe throw Caleb in there a little bit. Has that been more the foul situation, game situation or what do you like about Will coming into those situations?

MATT PAINTER: Yeah, it’s been Trey’s foul trouble and it’s also been a bigger center. Last night, that fit, right? They had a bigger center on High Point’s team and Trey hits that one foul early which isn’t foul trouble but to try to give him a little bit of a breather. And you just don’t know when the whistle comes, right? So I have done that before in the second half, and we’ll play two and a half, three straight minutes and you want him back in there quicker than that, but that’s mainly the reasons.

Q. Coach Brownell and some of the players from Clemson talked about how McNeese’s defensive switching, they sort of threw a lot at them and at times when they weren’t expecting it really threw them off. Now, I don’t know if that’s a card you can only play once, right? Once you show it, is it easier to prepare for it? But as you’re preparing for them, what goes into all that they throw at you?

MATT PAINTER: Right. Well, they switch all the time. I think what was a little different in that game, they went to their 2-2-1 or their 1-2-2 zone press back to a 2-3, which matched up into a man at the end of the possession. I think that was what was a little bit different from that, but any time you think something is going to be your achilles and it’s hard because you’re trying to project when you do your schedule, and sometimes your schedule gets out a little bit.

We have faced Alabama. We have faced Auburn. We faced Ole Miss. So we have faced some really good teams. I’m trying to think of the teams off the top of my head that switch and do some different things. So you got to be able to kind of schedule towards something that you think might give you trouble.

About 10, 12 years ago we struggled against a press and I thought it was more personnel based, but it bothered us for a couple years. So we always scheduled Huggy at West Virginia, so going in there, we went four years in a row, just as open scrimmages and that really helped us. Hopefully our experience of going against — and I think more people are switching. Maybe not five ways but different four ways. In college basketball now, you obviously see it in the NBA a lot.

But still, it’s not what they do, it’s really how they do it and how hard they play and how they close down passing lanes and pursuing the basketball. A lot of times when you see somebody press and everybody thinks everybody’s presses are the same when in reality it’s how much effort you’re giving. McNeese gives a lot of effort. They play very, very hard. They get a lot of deflections and a lot of steals. You just have to do a good job of taking care of the basketball. When you drive, you have to drive to space. If you’re going to drive to where bodies are, they’re going to take the body from you.

Q. Coach, how do you counteract a double-digit seed when they have some of the momentum and swagger coming in off an upset of their own? What do you have to do to take control and maybe get some confidence of your own early?

MATT PAINTER: Yeah, it really doesn’t matter what your seed is, they’re a great team. 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. Here’s what works against them. Here’s what does not work against them. Do as much of this as you can and stay the hell away from this because they’ve proven that they prey on that, whether it’s their extra effort getting extra possessions on the graph, whether it’s their pressing ability, their switching into their ball swipes. They are very, very aggressive, but there’s a method to their madness. They play very hard and they have rules to what they’re doing. So have that discipline and stay with it and then try to build that throughout the course of the game. Because there’s going to be mistakes made like there is in every game. Make sure we keep huddle and keep talking and stay on the same page.

Q. Matt, you guys have seen some of these great mid-major teams. There’s a fearlessness in some of them. We didn’t really blink collectively at a 12 over 5 upset yesterday here. Is it the portal? What do you attribute to some of these talented, cohesive teams?

MATT PAINTER: If you look at all the stops their plays have been to, they have high-major players on their team. Sometimes guys on their team who have never been to a high-major are still high-major caliber players. If you’re good, you’re good. They have a lot of good players, but more than anything, they’re connected.

I just think there’s a lot of parity in college basketball, a lot of change in college basketball. Whoever can get enough guys to be good together — because we see people get into the portal and they have a lot of talent and they underachieve. You see those coaches who do a better job than others just because they have that discipline and get them to buy into their system. That’s what he’s been able to do here.

You see total buy-in and they have that confidence, that swagger about them where they believe in each other and believe they can go out there and when. Why shouldn’t you? You win your league, when your tournament, 14 straight games, you should be confident. Well, these guys have the same resume. They’ve won 10 straight, but they’re had the same amount of wins. They’re going to feel that way, you just got to be able to play to your strengths and understand the difficulty that they cause people.

Q. You guys are never going to fly under the radar with everything you have accomplished obviously, but you face a team like McNeese coming off a “upset” does it make it easier in the second round to prepare and focus on you guys when a lot of the attention is going to be on them.

MATT PAINTER: Yeah, we stay process-based. Being in the tournament, we have had really good wins in the NCAA Tournament. We have had some really tough losses so we have been through a lot. A lot of times, the tough losses you have won’t be the group that you have. It’ll be five, six years before and they don’t feel that sting and understand that. Well, this group has. Our core players, our three leading scorers have been through some tough losses and so once last year and the National Championship game in the year before and the one 16 game. They learned hard lessons but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen again. It can rear its ugly head but it’s still the game. They understand that. We didn’t get beat by a 16 seed and we didn’t respect them. The refs didn’t do us in. We got beat straight up. That’s a tough pill to swallow but we had to sit in that and we did something about it the next year even though we didn’t end up winning the whole thing. We still did something about it. Kind of shows the character of the guys that we have, but, like, we know how good they are. That’s what we do. We just try to stay move to the next game. The narrative can be the narrative. It doesn’t matter. Move to the next game, understand what we have to do to be successful.

Q. You said McNeese and other teams do it, too, start a possession zone and end it man. How do you attack that? Do you start zone offense and be ready to go to different options when they go to man?

MATT PAINTER: We normally start with whatever we call, we stay with. I think that’s what they’re wanting to get, right? You have to be able to finish it. If you can’t get something, how do you attack at the end of a clock? We do a lot of stuff through Braden Smith and our ball screen stuff. No matter who is in the game they’re switching everything and you have to attack it from there.

That’s the whole part of pressing or picking the ball up, coming into a zone and going into a man. A lot of people in college basketball do it. Do they wait until the second wing pass? Do they wait until the third pass until they match? Does the ball go to the high post before they match? Everybody has their triggers when they match and go man to man. You just have to understand when that happens when it goes, if you don’t have a shot by then. But putting a lot of time into it. If you just run your regular stuff all the time against something like that, you’re going to get bogged down. I think that’s what you see with teams. It’s easier said than done because they will pick up on your pattern and your tendencies so you have to change with them and mix up different things and give different looks, so like you’re being unpredictable towards their change.

Q. Obviously you guys are led by Trey, Braden and Fletcher, but how important is it for guys like Camden, C.J. and Myles to fill their roles and will that lead you guys to success in the rest of the tournament here?

MATT PAINTER: Yeah, having depth is going to help you. There’s times where you’re not going to be able to get the same volume of shots every game. Those guys will be able to, Braden and Trey Kaufman especially where they’re going to get a lot of usage. Sometimes the game, what it brings, Cam’s going to get more opportunities or Myles is going to get more opportunities, but you always can defend. You always can rebound, you always can change the game. Like Gicarri Harris didn’t play a whole lot last night until the end, but he had eight rebounds. He was around the basketball. It made sense for him to stay in there and that gave us an extra ball handler in the game. Myles Colvin was very active. Cam might have been the difference from an individual standpoint. Getting a double-double, and they cross matched us to start with. They didn’t put their center on Trey Kaufman-Renn. So when we went to Cam they couldn’t cross match it. So we stayed with that but we also stayed with it because he played so well.

Our ability to rebound yesterday was the difference in the whole game in terms of we had so many more possessions than them by getting 19 offensive rebounds.

Q. Kind of following up on that, Will was a guy that started the season as a starter basically, had stretches where he didn’t play recently. Can you just talk about his ability to stay ready and stay with it?

MATT PAINTER: Yeah, Will’s been very professional and that’s a hard thing to do. We went to Trey Kaufman as the five from an offensive standpoint the way him and Braden can work. It gives us an advantage and puts centers in tough spots, but it also takes away, we don’t have rim protection and we’re not as big. And so that’s a little bit of the tradeoff and then somebody’s normally going to be out there at that time and it was him, and whether that’s fair or not, that’s the decision that we made. But he’s been very professional, he’s stayed with it, kept practicing hard, kept a good attitude. When you do that, you normally play well. You get mad, frustrated, sit there like… it’s hard. That’s natural, normal behavior, but give him credit. His number was called, and he really helped us.

PURDUE PLAYERS MYLES COLVIN AND CAMDEN HEIDE

Q. Myles, you had a dunk yesterday that went viral. Just wanting to know if you had a chance to see some of the responses on social media, if you got any special text messages or anything like that from that play yesterday.

THE MODERATOR: I did get a chance to look at it. Really nice play. I haven’t really fed into it a lot, obviously trying to prepare for McNeese tomorrow, so I think it was a good play, just going out there and doing my job, getting those offensive rebounds that we did. We did a really good job doing that the whole game. I think it was just a play followed up by a really good play by me, and Cam had a really nice play after that. So I think that was really big for us.

Q. For both you guys, this year has been more playing time, more scoring, more development for you guys. What has kind of clicked for both of you this season and how have you seen yourselves grow throughout the year?

CAMDEN HEIDE: I would say it’s just staying ready. Obviously when you have a role that you can play a lot of minutes one night, not so many the next night, you might take no shots in the game or shooting the ball quite a bit. I think it’s just the preparation that goes into each and every game, each and every practice and putting as much time as you can outside of our scheduled practice times to stay ready for moments and when your name’s called just going out and performing.

MYLES COLVIN: Yeah, I would have to agree with what Cam says. Just preparation, really. That’s a big part of all of it. Not just the physical getting exercise. I think it’s also more the mental. We’re not going to know how many minutes we play that night. We just try to produce as much as we can with the minutes that we have. It’s just becoming more comfortable with the offense and the defense of the schemes that we have. I think that’s really huge that we started to learn and grow and made a big leap from last year to this year.

Q. Most of your Big Ten season, your games were spaced out pretty much but three days and here in the NCAA Tournament it’s set up to play Thursday and again tomorrow. What’s the biggest challenge of that quick turnaround and how quickly you can learn about your next opponent, McNeese?

MYLES COLVIN: I don’t think it’s that much of a challenge for us. We have been through a lot of situations like this already in the past couple years for both of us going to Maui, going to the Rady Invitation in San Diego. So I think it’s huge for us to be in those situations before the Big Ten Tournament and the NCAA Tournament to prepare us for those turnarounds playing elite teams and seeing different offenses and defenses. So I think that’s really huge for us.

CAMDEN HEIDE: Yeah, a lot of it is just mental preparation. You don’t get enough… or I guess the same time you would get for a normal scout and these quick back-to-back games. You just have to prepare mentally, at the hotel, watching a lot of film, just getting as much time as you can to spend mentally preparing because we don’t have a lot of time to physically prepare for them.

Q. This question is for Myles. Have you gotten to experience any of the love your dad gets in this area being a former New England Patriot, and do you have any memories of his career or do you only see it on tape?

MYLES COLVIN: I haven’t been able to get out and walk around, but I didn’t really remember a lot of his career because I was around three or four. The soonest I really remember is when I moved to Indianapolis. I think that’s really where I started to get a lot of my memories as a young kid. I have seen a lot of tapes playing, but I wish I could have had the opportunity to remember that and experience that stuff.

Q. Better athlete?

MYLES COLVIN: I have to go with myself. Always bet on yourself. I’m more athletic, I can jump higher. I’m definitely a little faster, so, yeah.

Q. You talked about this short turnaround. McNeese threw what looked like a lot of defense, I guess that’s a good way to put it. They just threw a lot at Clemson. With that said, having a fast turnaround, how do you process that? What’s the process of preparing for a lot of defense on a short turnaround?

CAMDEN HEIDE: We run a lot of different plays that can go against a lot of different defenses, so for us it’s just knowing what we want to run, what they’re going to do defensively and different things we need to do offensively, and it helps when everyone is on the same page. That’s one thing that we’ve challenged ourselves is making sure everyone is on the same page, everyone knows what they’re doing, doing their job before and after a shot goes up. Because there’s a lot of different things that can go wrong, especially if one person is not doing their job. Kind of 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.

MYLES COLVIN: To add onto that, everything he said was correct and spot on. I think it’s also due to us being able to play different teams and different styles of play defensively and offensively leading up to this point, and I think we have seen a lot of different teams. We played low-major teams where they have been quicker, faster getting to the ball and disrupt our office. We have also been against teams that are bigger, stronger. So I think it’s just also a preparation, like we said, being in situations where we can have those quick turnarounds but also playing those teams where we’re not used to playing them during the season, during the Big Ten play and that’s helped us along the way.

Q. As you guys mentally prepare, have you talked to your student managers at all preparing for the most viral student manager in the country, Amir?

MYLES COLVIN: I think the team, we have seen him on our social media, but it’s really cool for him to have that NIL deal and all that stuff. We’re focused on getting the job done and winning the game.

CAMDEN HEIDE: I agree with that.