Purdue's starting point for turnaround is simple, it believes
Matt Painter harps on detail and "little things" as much as any of his peers in college coaching, more than most actually.
This week, the finer points take a backseat and big things cast a long shadow over little ones.
Purdue's riding a four-game losing streak, its longest in years. Saturday against Michigan, a relatively one-sided Wolverine win in the Boilermakers' stronghold of Mackey Arena was a shock.
For Painter, as it almost always does when course correction is needed, there's no singular panacea for all that ills his team beyond one thing: Effort.
"Our competitiveness has to be better more than anything," Painter said. "We have to get out in front of things, compete and play hard and I think when you do that then the other schematic things come into play. Schematically, it doesn't matter what you do if you don't play harder than the person in front of you, and that's what we've hung our hats on.
"We know what we're doing. We have good guys, intelligent guys. We know what we're doing, but we have to go out there and when that ball gets loose, and it's a 50/50 ball or a rebound, you've got to dominate in that area. When you have a chance to sprint back on defense or sprint up on offense, you've got to keep going as hard as you can, put that kind of stressor on their offense or their defense."
Thursday night's opponent is Indiana, who stands as a fitting backdrop for Purdue's position.
It was Feb. 8 that Purdue, then a team who'd yet to win a road game of note in Big Ten play, broke through with a win that came as a product of one of the Boilermakers' most complete, most focused, most precise performances of the season, regardless of venue.
They haven't won since.
"We just played hard," said sophomore Sasha Stefanovic, one of Purdue's more consistent effort types, of that first Indiana game. "I don't know if it was anything we tried to do differently. I think we just played a lot harder than we had before, and since then we haven't done the same."
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That's been the emphasis this week, a "look in the mirror" sort of week, as Stefanovic called it.
Painter asked his team whether it thought Indiana's and Iowa's coaches left those respective games believing their teams gave a better effort than Purdue. Then, he asked Purdue whether it thought Purdue gave a better effort than Penn State or Michigan, the two teams who've won In Mackey Arena as part of the four-game slide.
"(Saturday) was a very frustrating day for us," Painter said of the Michigan game. "That's your job as a head coach to get your team ready to play and to play hard and we didn't. That lands on me, and it always lands on you as the coach. You have to get your team ready to play and we weren't. That's difficult because we've really hung our hat on that aspect through the years."
Purdue's NCAA Tournament hopes have been critically wounded, and that's where the contrast with the Hoosiers applies, too.
Since the loss to Purdue on the day Bob Knight returned to Assembly Hall, and then the blowout loss at Michigan that followed, Indiana has done everything it's needed to to make the NCAA Tournament, while Purdue's results have diverged wholly.
These two teams have headed in very different directions, following that day in Bloomington when it looked like the Boilermakers were bound for the NCAA Tournament and the Hoosiers the NIT. Now, the script has flipped, and there's a reason for it, Painter says.
He refers back to the offensive rebounds Evan Boudreaux grabbed to close out the win at Indiana, and saw Indiana making those very same sorts of plays this weekend against Penn State, a Quad 1 for the Hoosiers that almost got away. They were "winning plays" that "came from their effort," Painter said.
Purdue's showing last time these two teams met serves as the standard it hopes to match, or even exceed, Thursday night.
"We talked maybe a month ago about how we have to know we trust each other and have each other's backs," guard Eric Hunter said of Purdue's "urgency" at this stage. "We have to play for our seniors. That's what we did last year, and what kind of drove us, especially down the home stretch ... just knowing we're playing for someone other than ourselves."
Painter said following the Michigan game that his team's "attention to detail" has been lacking at times during the losing streak. That's important, but again, he says, not most important.
"I feel like a broken record, but it's just playing hard," Stefanovic echoed. "We haven't done that lately at all and we've let people kind of hit us first, take the fight to us and that's not how this program was built. It's been kind of an embarrassing stretch of games where we've kind of gone away from what we're good at and we have to turn that around."
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