After trying freshman season, Eric Hunter's come of age for Purdue
Twice the past few games, Eric Hunter has massaged the end of the shot clock with his dribble, working over its final seconds with a defender near-by, and twice he's craftily created space enough for himself to beat that shot clock with three-pointers, their value outsized in low-scoring games.
A few times, too, the Purdue sophomore guard's attentiveness has come to the forefront in defensive rotations, like the one he parlayed into a turnover vs. Virginia, which he then finished off with a three-pointer in transition.
There have been countless examples this season of the difference between Hunter now and Hunter then, during a freshman season that left him at times questioning himself, looking for his place, and, well, tired.
"I don't think I slept last year," Hunter said back in the summer, well in advance this season. "I had an 8:30 class and I was going to bed at 3 for no good reason, just being a busy body. My mom says that when I was a kid I used to say, 'If I go to sleep early, I might miss something' and I guess I really think that way now that I'm older."
Already struggling to acclimate to the college game, and college life, while trying to find his way on a team dominated by older, highly influential players, Hunter wasn't helping himself.
"It's just life, everything you have to do," Hunter said. "I did a bad job last year asking for help. I never asked for help in high school. It was easier to just figure things out. But you need help in this world, need someone to talk to, to ask questions.
"You can ask anybody around here. Last year was hard for me."
On the court, off the court, whatever it may been.
Basketball didn't come easily. Neither did school.
The transition from a high school graduating class of about 55 to the magnitude of a university of tens of thousands, and the freedom that comes with it, was stark.
"It was everything, but it just starts with making sure you have things done off the court, outside this (basketball) building," Hunter said, "so that you can be relaxed in here and able to only think about what you have to do, to only think about practice. It was like a whole different world that first year.
"This time last year, I was probably like, 'Yeah, I've got the blueprint,' and thought I knew what it meant to work hard and do what it takes. What I figured out when the season started was, 'I don't have it' and it kind of shocked me. It hit me like a wall.'"
Hunter said he did question whether "this is what I want to do" and said he told his father, Eric Sr., as much.
"That goes to show how hard it is, how hard it can get," Hunter said. "It was a lot of on-the-court and off-the-court stuff that just could have taken me out of my element had I let it."
He did not.
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Only six Indiana high school players ever scored more points than Hunter did at Charles A. Tindley. His 2,583 points fell only a dozen shy of Rick Mount.
But about a year ago at this time, Maryland's Anthony Cowan attacked him on defense in a way that made the then-freshman understand things were now very different. A few weeks later at Michigan State, Purdue lost, but Hunter had held his own off the bench defending the league's eventual Player-of-the-Year, Cassius Winston.
Come NCAA Tournament time, Purdue was thrown the strangest of curveballs prior to tipoff vs. Old Dominion in Hartford, as Nojel Eastern slipped in warmups on a slick spot on the floor and was quarantined to the locker room for the first half. Hunter's first college start came on as short a notice as could be.
Surprised by the attention paid to the story afterward, Hunter said he "didn't have time to be nervous."
It showed, because Hunter held up just fine and Purdue took its first step toward the Elite Eight with relative ease.
The freshman may not have been ready, per se, but he looked like it, at least, and that set that game apart from the bulk of his season.
Hunter didn't shoot well as a freshman. He wasn't needed to on a team built around a couple of elite shooters in Carsen Edwards and Ryan Cline, but regardless, a player recruited largely for his shooting didn't fare so well when the rare opportunity arose.
Part of the reason: He wasn't ready to.
That was Matt Painter's message then to Hunter when the season ended, in both narrow and broad senses: Be ready.
That's how things are different now, the distinct readiness reflected in Hunter's play, and much better Purdue is for it.
Hunter's trending toward being next in the line of Purdue players for which things unfold "backwards," as he puts it, players who arrive with robust offensive reputations but, shall we say, modest expectations on defense, who turn into very good defenders. First it was Rapheal Davis, then Dakota Mathias, now Hunter.
"If you'd have told me that," Hunter said back in the summer. "I'd have thought something was wrong with you."
Purdue lost at Marquette a couple weeks ago, but by no fault of the defensive job Hunter did against one of the game's elite scorers, Markus Howard, amidst Eastern's foul trouble.
Meanwhile, the offense has responded in the face of opportunity.
On a team reinventing itself offensively, Hunter's 33 assists – at a 2-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio — are a team-high and he's averaging 10 points per game, playing multiple backcourt positions.
He's made four of seven threes the past two games — important wins over Virginia and Northwestern — pushing his percentage for the season to nearly 36 percent.
He's 10-of-17 the past five games.
Last year, he was 10-of-46.
Prior to the season, Hunter laid out his hopes for the year to come like this: "Just being able to do what I'm asked to do, and more."
Thus far, that's precisely what he's done, and figures to continue to do, and that wall that hit him as a freshman, it seems well on its way to being knocked down.
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