Three Thoughts From The Weekend: Zach Edey and the NBA, Purdue’s ambitious scheduling and more
GoldandBlack.com’s Three Thoughts from the Weekend column runs every Monday morning, with analysis of Purdue football, Boilermaker men’s basketball, recruiting, or whatever else comes to mind. In this week’s edition, Zach Edey and the NBA, Purdue basketball’s ambitious scheduling and more.
ON ZACH EDEY AND THE NBA
This week, Zach Edey takes up in Chicago as part of this spring’s mission to prove his worth as an NBA player in a game that has to some extent passed players like him by.
But not totally. Edey winning back-to-back Player-of-the-Year honors and taking Purdue to a Final Four has to — has to — change the way we perceive college basketball in terms of style of play. Trending generally filters down from the NBA, but why can’t the opposite be true?
I’m not saying Edey is going to Shaq’s sequel, but those who’d be inclined to dismiss his chances to be a valuable professional player in the best league on Earth either don’t know what they’re talking about or aren’t paying attention to much of anything. But those are the very ignorant voices who’ve been shadow-boxing with Edey for a few years now.
No, there aren’t many players like Edey starring in the NBA anymore, but there are plenty of reasonable variations thereof making great livings at that level. Size matters. Rebounding translates. Mobility will never be a strength necessarily, but it’s not going to be the open wound people will assume, nor will his ability to switch onto guards, which he did this season at Purdue, fairly well. Edey will make 100 percent of his dunks and in a league where the many must complement the few, that’s sort of important. Edey will play hard every night, and that very quality once got Brian Cardinal like $50 million.
This is the sort of stuff NBA people have been finding out these past few months as Edey really helped himself during his senior year in ways that will make a whole column in itself.
Is Edey an outlier? Yeah, kinda, but the league is full of outliers at both ends of the spectrum. The MVP is a point guard in a polar bear’s body, for crying out loud. Never mind the fact that there are corpses playing center right now in the Boston-Cleveland series. And when 37-year-old Al Horford — by my estimation, the last Gene Keady recruiting target still playing basketball — comes out, in comes Luke Kornet. Can Zach Edey really not be Luke Kornet? No offense, Luke Kornet.
They come in all shapes and sizes.
That doesn’t mean Edey isn’t a tricky evaluation for the NBA intelligentsia.
When it comes to the up-side quotient, they have to view Edey as both a 22-year-old who played four years of college basketball but also the fact he hasn’t even come close yet to having a decade of basketball experience. Further, NBA people have to take what they see of Edey in an alpha role and project it to a complementary role, which actually might amplify what he can do.
I think Edey will be a first-round pick — he’s earned that, but this is also a thin draft, by every account — and will get a credible opportunity. Be surprised if he doesn’t take full advantage of that opportunity.
ON PURDUE SCHEDULING BIG
The Big 12 showed everybody this year you could spend November and December punching down and still sweet talk the NET rankings the way those who schedule in and above their weight class do.
Post-Edey, Purdue could have gone a bit easier on itself than it has these past few seasons.
It will not. Consistent with Painter’s approach to keep doing what he’s doing after making a Final Four, here comes another monster schedule.
It’ll include games against Texas A&M, Alabama, Auburn and Marquette, all of which will be top-15 sort of preseason teams, it would appear. That says nothing of an MTE that could bring BYU and/or Arkansas and their new coaches.
Purdue’s been doing this for years, for two reasons.
First is to build strength-of-schedule points to combine with a 20-game Big Ten schedule to make for strong résumés.
More importantly is improvement. The long game, with the idea in mind that a loss in December could make you better when there are Big Ten championships on the line or NCAA Tournament games to be won. It just so happens that Purdue hasn’t lost any of those non-conference games, which is fine, too.
ON GRADUATION
This weekend all over the country, including at Purdue, families fought in the streets for dinner reservations and their kids dressed up in weird robes and borderline dangerous headwear for the most boring, uncomfortable times of their lives.
Yes, graduation.
So here’s my annual note about the importance of those diplomas.
That’s what this has long been all about, before it became about so much more.
It still matters and ought to be celebrated, especially for those who might not have gotten a higher education otherwise.
These degrees matter, but so does what it says about a man or woman who takes advantage of their opportunities and better themselves at formative ages. A lot of people don’t get these chances and many of those who do carry stifling debt into their marriages or that window of life where owning your own home (kinda) becomes a big, big deal.
Transfer Culture and NIL profiteering give student-athletes so much more than they had before but that doesn’t mean what they had prior didn’t matter.
Hopefully those bouncing around from school to school are mindful of that because someday, they’re going to stop paying you to do sandwich commercials.
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