Three Thoughts From The Weekend: Purdue basketball recruiting and nothing else

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, we discuss Boilermaker basketball recruiting in this new era and more.

This week, due to travel and a suffocating dearth of thoughts, it’s A Thought From The Week.

ON PURDUE BASKETBALL RECRUITING

Pretty much everything has changed in basketball recruiting these days, what with the many sea changes that have affected the landscape in just the past three or four years alone. But at Purdue, very little will change.

While so many other programs out there will chase their centerpieces every year off the transfer wire, Purdue will chase pieces, supplementing with transfers, not building with them. The high school player and long-term team-building will remain the center of Matt Painter’s recruiting universe.

There’s no right way or wrong way to do it nowadays, no manual, very little precedent for success and failure amidst these new conditions on the ground. But Purdue’s chosen path — better said, the path it’s always taken and merely chosen not to deviate from — will stand in contrast to many, many others, including some in the Big Ten. Every year, you’ll see Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, etc., falling all over themselves for any decent transfer that comes along, like city pigeons over a downed hunk of bagel.

Again, there are plenty of ways to win and even more ways to lose, so it’s hard to say who’s gonna be right and wrong in all this, though early returns for Purdue are positive given that it’s had a No. 1 team two years running right at the onset of the Transfer and NIL eras, without high-impact transfers, with minimal benefit from COVID years and without overtly buying recruits.

There are going to be pros and cons to both program-building worldviews.

The biggest potential landmine with Purdue’s more traditional M.O. would be the risk of occasionally being young when so many other people are old, albeit cosmetically old in most cases, since experience and experience together can be two different things. Still, those years when Purdue has 18-year-olds playing in early March Big Ten games or the NCAA Tournament against 22- and 23-year-olds, that could be rough.

The occasional turbulence that comes with high school recruits can sometimes leave a team short of something, as well, whereas the transfer hoarders can just go get what they need on a year-to-year basis, rife with uncertainty as it may be. Consider it the difference between growing your own carrots and buying them from Aldi. Yours might taste fresh and be more satisfying to include in your stew, but the ones from the store were more convenient and less labor-intensive. That said, those Aldi carrots have also been well traveled and there’s no telling what sort of dirt you may have to wash off them. (Truthfully, I have no idea if Aldi even sells carrots, so don’t think I’m accusing them of selling dirty veggies.)

Conversely, those years when Purdue has such a group, built up from the grassroots level and buoyed by continuity and the chemistry that can be forged from playing together for a long period of time, those years can be special. This season to come could be one of those years.

It will also help to have better players than your opponents. That part of the game will never change. A talented 19-year-old is more valuable than any 22-year-old doorstop you can pull out of free agency.

The key for Purdue is to get good players, but as importantly, keep getting individuals who fit and whose agendas align with the program’s. In the best-case scenario, retention is a front-end recruiting matter (and that’s where NIL can benefit Purdue more than any other way). Vetting has always been key for Purdue, with more success on that front than not. These transfer hubs, when you recruit a kid for a week, how do you expect to know whether he’s a compulsive glue-sniffer or something? Or worse. It’s a dangerous game. Anybody can be on their best behavior for 48 hours during an official visit, but what happens when they show up and start feeling at home? Again, it’s a dangerous game.

Get good players, develop good players, keep good players and fill needs along the way. That’ll be Purdue’s continued way of doing business when so many others go a different way.

Chances are, neither to turn out to be right or wrong. Good players with good coaches will continue to win, no matter the backstory. But there will be pros and cons to both approaches.

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