Improved guard play pivotal to Purdue's success next season
More: 2020-2021 Purdue Prospectus
For Purdue to reverse its fortunes next season to a meaningful extent following last season's unevenness, there's no way around it having to start on offense.
A lot went into the Boilermakers' offensive difficulties last season, as they finished 12th in the Big Ten in scoring, 261st nationally per KenPom in effective field goal percentage and averaged a highly pedestrian .862 points per possession for the season, a drop from the .974 of the championship season prior.
Again, much went into those struggles, and much will matter as Purdue looks to reverse such trending.
It starts, though, in the backcourt.
"Our guards have to be better decision-makers than they were," Coach Matt Painter said in the spring. "There was a real learning curve there for some guys who are quality players that can grow into being better players than they showed."
The decision-making piece that Painter, associate head coach Micah Shrewsberry and staff will focus on in advance of next season doesn't necessarily jump off the stat sheet at a casual glance.
The Boilermakers did a respectable job taking care of the basketball and avoiding turnovers, achieving one of their foremost offensive goals, likely the basis for a deceptive top-50 overall finish in offensive efficiency on KenPom.
It was apparent, though, on game days.
Purdue's offense was often at its best when its guards attacked effectively pushing the basketball up the floor, as was a particular emphasis as the season went on.
That element's effectiveness, though, underscored the very issue, that halfcourt execution was such a struggle at times that the Boilermakers were better off sidestepping it altogether. According to Synergy Sports, Purdue was bottom third nationally in halfcourt efficiency.
Decision-making is arguably the biggest component of halfcourt offense.
"That's an area we felt like we fluctuated," Shrewsberry said.
This spring, as coaching became a streaming service, Purdue organized Zoom calls for its newcomers, in advance of their enrollments, lining up guest speakers, one of them being former guard Ryan Cline, a player Shrewsberry cites as an example of the sort of reliability Purdue would love from its guards now.
Cline was not a high-volume dribbler nor a penetrator, but he had the ball in his hands as much as anyone in 2018-2019 for Purdue and wound up turning the ball over only 42 times in 1,200-plus minutes, acting as a key offensive presence for a great offensive team as a ball-mover as much as anything.
"He wasn't a creator, but he was a decision-maker," Shrewsberry said. "You don't have to be a guy who's getting into the paint all the time or making moves to do it. It's just making the right passes and making the right basketball plays.
"That's where our guys need to continue to grow, especially our backcourt."
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It's a reasonable expectation.
In the spring, Painter lamented turbulent decision-making shown by experienced players, the only player fitting the coach's description there being Nojel Eastern, who has since transferred. Jahaad Proctor, who added scoring punch to Purdue's backcourt but didn't have extensive background in its system and admitted at times there was a learning curve for him playing with other high-level scoring options, graduated.
Among guards, juniors Eric Hunter and Sasha Stefanovic and sophomore Isaiah Thompson are the returning foundation.
All of them should — should — benefit from experience, from the nearly 2,400 minutes they combined to carry in either their first seasons as starters, or their first season, period.
"My overall freshman season, just watching and seeing where I was at the start of the season to where I was at the end, I feel like I was a different player," Thompson said. "I definitely grew in that aspect, learned a lot about myself, and the next year it's going to get tougher, but in reality it gets easier because the more experience I got the better I played."
Improvement through experience will matter, too, Purdue hopes, in its other area of needed improvement.
"We want to demand a better pace from our guys — how hard we're cutting, the effort it takes to get open," Shrewsberry said. "We worked on it, but that's something we need to continue to get better at, which would allow our bigs to get open more, allow more separation, allow for things to open up more."
Purdue's offense is heavy in ball-screen and dribble-handoff actions and movement away from the ball, the execution of which was a decided strength for the Carsen Edwards- and Ryan Cline-led team of two seasons ago, then a distinct deficiency last season, as Purdue's less-experienced guards — with some exceptions — were often prone to passiveness in such situations. It showed up in particular against the most aggressive and most physical defensive teams, of which the Big Ten was stacked with both.
Per Synergy, Purdue was nearly bottom quartile nationally in efficiency vs. man-to-man defense — the Big Ten, of course, is predominately man-to-man — and Stefanovic was the only guard to measure out respectably in pick-and-roll ball-handler situations, on the lowest volume of the guards. Stefanovic and Hunter's analytics suggest they fared OK using screens, but Purdue's team as a whole was middle of the pack nationally in an area where it would much prefer to excel.
The need for across-the-board improvement is significant.
"The experience we got with our guards," Thompson said. "I feel like we can really take that next step."
If they don't, nothing is guaranteed. If experience alone isn't a transformative element for the returnees, competition might be.
Freshmen Jaden Ivey and Ethan Morton are two of the finest guard recruits Matt Painter has signed in his decade-and-a-half at Purdue, at least as far as their recruiting profiles suggest, and the strengths of both players' skill sets would appear to align with Boilermaker deficiencies from a year ago. Ivey is known as a multi-faceted scorer who plays fast; Morton is the best passer Painter has recruited, according to Painter, and passing was not Purdue's strength last season.
Redshirt freshman Brandon Newman also came to Purdue as a highly decorated recruit, with a reputation as one of the finest shooters in his class nationally, and unlike the other newcomers, he has a year in the program behind him.
That's a six-man group that represents perhaps the most talented corps of guards Purdue's had under Painter, though a group with much to prove.
"We've got some competitive guys," Hunter said. "It's going to be fun when we get back."
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