From a lottery pick to 59 wins, Purdue's Sr. class heads to a final March

The drive from Toronto, Ontario to Legacy Courts in Lafayette, Indiana is 809 kilometers. I'm using kilometers cause, if you didn't know, Toronto is in Canada.

It's where Zach Edey is from, and that's the drive he made with his mother in 2020.

Some more facts that are both as striking as they are obvious - 2020 was an interesting time to be starting a college basketball career. The world and the US was still very much in the middle of COVID and the pandemic. The season before was called off just before Purdue was set to play in its first Big Ten Tournament game without a double-bye.

That season was lost for every team in the country. One day there were games, the next, the world was shut down. For Painter and the Boilers, that season was too much about losing. Purdue finished 16-15 with a team that was young, but needed help.

Help was coming, west on US 24 after splitting most the Great Lakes.

This class' story starts in Louisville, Kentucky, and the year is 2019.

Purdue has just lost in the Elite Eight to Virginia in overtime. There's a missed Ryan Cline free throw, a missed Virginia free throw, a tip, a pass, a floater, all working together to create another chapter of Purdue heartbreak in March.

Carsen Edwards scored 42 points in that game. He knocked down 10 of 19 three-pointers, each one of them ranging from Steph Curry to Dame Lillard zone.

Edwards was incredible all NCAA Tournament. He broke the record for most made threes in a tournament run. He scored 26, 42, 29, and 42 points in his four games. It's a historic run that seemed destined to carry Painter through to the Final Four. But instead, all those rising points of conflict, plot turns, and unfortunate bounces went against Purdue, again.

But Edwards used that showing and the momentum to an early second round pick in the following NBA Draft. Edwards left as a junior, and his absence alongside back court mate, Ryan Cline, led to the hollowing out of a roster now void of a primary scorer.

Purdue went just 16-15 without Edwards. Painter tried to gather scoring from the portal, but Jahaad Proctor and Evan Boudreaux weren't enough to fill in for the absence of two of Purdue's most prolific shooters.

Instead, COVID ended a Purdue season before it could taste what the Big Ten Tournament was like without a double bye. It ended before Painter's streak of NCAA Tournaments could be broken.

Purdue didn't hit rock bottom that season, but for the first time in a while, it looked like it could be heading down.

"We weren't allowed to come here to Mackey and do some things because there were rules in place. But us guys wanted to play some ball and get together," Carson Barrett is telling me a couple days before senior day about a day in 2020, the first day that Zach Edey would make his way to Purdue campus as a player. Barrett was part of the same recruiting class that's getting ready to graduate and leave Purdue.

It's important to note that this class, which will leave Purdue as the winningest class in the history of the Big Ten, did not come in with the ranking pedigree that would suggest they would be program defining.

Jaden Ivey was the star of the class, carrying a 4-star from Rivals, but only the 79th rank in the nation. Ethan Morton wasn't far behind him, but Zach Edey?

Edey, the 7-4, about to be two time player of the year, was a lucky accident, a third choice for Painter when his top two choices went elsewhere. Edey was a three-star because Purdue offered him, and not rated in the top-400.

"When he [Edey] reclassed," Painter said after Purdue's last regular season game of the season, a 78-70 Purdue win that had Edey go for 25 points and 14 rebounds against Wisconsin. "We had lost out on two guys. The guys we lost out on were Hunter Dickinson and Ryan Kalkbrenner, those were the two guys. But when Ryan and Hunter told us no, he hadn't reclassified yet."

"But that is his class," Painter continued. "In Canada, everybody normally goes five years... So when he made the shift from Canada to go to IMG, he wasn't a player at the time - so he's like I need more time."

Edey is as unlikely a college basketball star as you will find, despite his height. He wasn't even a basketball player until late in his high school career. He didn't know ball, to be frank.

So he arrived fresh off an eight and a half hour drive, and ended up at Legacy Courts for a Purdue open gym where a lot of his teammates would see him for the first time.

It's an environment that isn't conducive to the best, most experienced of big men. But that story, it deserves its own headline. As do many of these. We'll get to them as March unfurls.

Jaden Ivey didn't go out with the bang that Carsen Edwards did in the NCAA Tournament. Maybe, you could say he did the opposite. In his final game for Purdue, Purdue lost in the Sweet Sixteen to the #15 seed and unlikely Cinderella team, St. Peter's, 67-64.

Ivey had just 9 points after being the best player on the floor against Texas and Yale in the first two rounds of the tournament.

But Ivey, 6-4, 200 lbs., could jump out of the gym, and burst past anyone in transition. He was exactly what the NBA covets in its guards. He had all the instincts with the ball in his hands even if his defense attention waned at times.

Before Jaden Ivey, Purdue had never been #1 in the nation. Ivey helped lead a squad to the top of the AP Poll, and then to a #2 seed in March. He would be crowned an All-American, and in a sense, provided the same thing Edwards did in March. Ivey made Purdue cool in a way that wasn't always the case even as Purdue won a lot of Big Ten conference games.

The Detroit Pistons would take Jaden Ivey fifth in the 2022 draft.

Once again, a Purdue roster looked void of one big star.

But before Ethan Morton, before Jaden Ivey, and before Zach Edey, Mason Gillis was at Purdue wearing a redshirt and recovering. His knee had gone through some stuff. His body had already gone through a career's worth of injury before he ever played a minute at Purdue.

His back is and will always be under maintenance he told me earlier this season.

As an elder statesmen, his body still insists on reminding him of his limitations. Gillis then ignores them. Gillis plays basketball like a WWE superstar. He throws his body around with abandon. He goes for finishers and high flying moves, scraps and fights in piles, and doesn't stop till the bell sounds. He gives up his body in moments like its scripted and someone will be waiting to catch him before he crashes to the ground.

But nothing about this class, or this team, could have been written ahead of time. We do our best to speculate, to look into the future and see greatness, but sometimes it comes out of nowhere, like Gillis after a rebound.

"Not a lot of us were high recruits or top of the line, whatever," Gillis said after senior day. "We just work hard and have each other's back. And at the end of the day, we love hooping together. And it makes it a lot better. We're relationship guys. We're brothers, not just teammates. It's more than a game. And in 10, 15 years, I'll be able to call Lance, and hopefully he'll answer. I would bet money he'd answer. But that's the biggest thing. Our group of guys, it's bigger than basketball with us."

Six seniors stood in front of a sold out Mackey Arena crowd. All of them had only ever experienced Mackey Arena this way - full, filling to the brim with fans. It's Gillis that breaks hardest, the emotions still gathered around his eyes minutes later in the media room as he almost breaks again talking about his guys.

Gillis you see, he's a protector. He's a straight-line, no non-sense kind of guy. He talks in cliches not because he's cliche, but because he believes them. He wears them.

When I talk to his teammates, they all laugh a little, at the toughness, the big muscles, the seriousness. Camden Heide tells me he's the one that can break him, get into that soft spot inside his chest. Then Chase Martin tells me the same. He can get to him the best.

It's obvious, then, that Mason Gillis, built of stone and hard of work, has a soft spot for all of them in the same way. They can all get to him. They can all break him. That's the bond. That's the agreement.

When Purdue was stormed by Northwestern fans the year prior, Purdue's smallest member, a true freshman, Braden Smith, found himself in a mob of students rushing around him in purple. Gillis did not hesitate. He walked into the storm.

When Mason Gillis talks to his teammates during the senior day ceremony, he tells them one thing above all else.

In ten, twenty, thirty years, don't hesitate. Reach out to him. Call him. Text him. If they need anything, he'll be there.

"Cares about everyone on the team," Carson Barret told me a few days before that speech. "He's one of the guys that will send a text and make sure everyone's alright or anyone needs anything."

"I believe the night Coach Painter saw him play his first game - I'm almost positive he shot two shots in the first half," Matt Clement told me last year. "He knew Painter was there. He shot two shots in the first half because of the way the team was defending him. We won the game easy."

Matt Clement was a major league baseball player, a pitcher, who bounced around the league in a more than decade long career. Clement was also from a town in Pennsylvania called Butler.

Ethan Morton grew up in the town of Butler, Pennsylvania. After Clement's baseball career, he came back to Butler to coach Butler's high school basketball team. Ethan Morton is the best player he ever had and ever will coach, he told me then.

Morton thinks, a lot, maybe too much, on the court and off it. After that game, he was thinking that was probably it for him and Purdue.

"I remember thinking after the game, I was like he's probably not going to recruit me anymore because I think I didn't even score ten points," Morton told me last year. "But we won. I always appreciated him [Painter]. He always did a good job showing up."

But Painter offered Morton not long after, and Morton fell in love with Purdue, Painter, and a program that reminded him of the place he'd come from.

"It kinda reminds me a little bit of Lafayette," Morton told me last year about his hometown Butler, PA. "Just as far as the downtown and the size and the people. Home's great. I've always been sort of a homebody. That's why it was hard at first to come here. It was a little far."

But distance is only way to measure progress. Morton has watched as his program has evolved, and the better Purdue has gotten around him, the more he's had to sacrifice. He's a part of the winningest class in program history.

He played just 3 minutes on senior day. He took one shot and had one steal.

But Clement's words echo in my head as I'm talking to Trey Kaufman-Renn about Morton. Clement said Morton is the best player he'll ever coach, not for what he did on the court, but his intangibles.

"Incredible glue guy getting everybody on the same page whether at practice or in a game," Kaufman-Renn told me a month ago. "But I think as far as a person, just uniting all these different personalities in the locker room. Like that's what it takes to win. Like if we don't have Ethan, we simply don't win the number of games we do. Just because while we're all good guys, we do have different personalities. We do have different interests and styles so the fact he's able to go to talk to me for example - an introvert, analytical thinking - but then he's able to go talk to somebody else who may not be like that. And still connect with them and communicate with them, I think is the biggest part he brings with them.

Purdue's seniors built a lot, but they also needed help, and found it. Lance Jones came from Southern Illinois, a joyous burst of energy, and real toughness. He's fit in better than anyone could have hoped.

That connectedness has helped Purdue get back to the #1 seed, to the top of the Big Ten, on the precipice, again, of getting Matt Painter and this program to the promised land.

This is just the start of our look at this senior class, a taste of the stories they've left behind, and the ones still to come. Purdue is days away from the Big Ten Tournament where it will try to win a second straight. But looming larger, less than two weeks away, March Madness.

Purdue will have to face the weight of its own success, its own failures, its history, and its future.

It won't be easy, but this team has grown and shown itself up to every moment this season. The lights will shine bright when Purdue steps back on the biggest stage.

But Morton told me this last season and it still stands true.

"It's not a pressure, it's a privilege."

It's a privilege these seniors have earned.