The folllowing story appears in Gold and Black Illustrated's newly published edition — Vol. 28, Issue 3 (January-February 2018 issue. You can pre-order the new issue here.
If there’s been any one moment that’s summed up Matt Haarms’ stunning debut season at Purdue, it occurred in the Bahamas around Thanksgiving, as part of the game that might have changed the Boilermakers’ season.
Coming off back-to-back unexpected losses at the Battle 4 Atlantis, Purdue was playing in an even-more-unexpected last-place game against then-No. 2 Arizona, pitting the Boilermaker frontcourt against Wildcat prodigy Deandre Ayton, who’s a few months from being the first or second pick in the NBA draft and probably a few years away from earning more than the GDP of some small countries to play basketball.
He’s one of the most talented players and influential presences in college basketball and will be for a couple more months at least.
In this particular instance, Ayton sized up Purdue’s skinny-looking young big man who no one had ever heard of at that early juncture of the season, dribbled into a post-up, faked inside, then spun outside to shoot a baseline turnaround over Haarms.
Ayton is 7-foot-1, by the way.
But Haarms is actually two inches taller and not one to back down from anyone, as shown time and again during this, his redshirt freshman season for the Boilermakers.
Ayton turned, faded and shot.
Haarms rose, closed and swatted the shot out of bounds.
Then, he clapped his hands together and yelped in celebration, as he’s known to do.
It was all there in the span of just a few seconds, Haarms flashing the game-changing defense that’s transformed Purdue at that end of the floor and helped make it one of the better teams in college basketball to this point, and showing the sort of exuberance and competitiveness Purdue has come to love and crowds at traditional Big Ten snakepits in Bloomington and East Lansing and Madison will inevitably come to loathe.
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Haarms is a towering 20-year-old who could pass for 17, a 250-pounder who could pass for 210.
He looks young and he looks skinny, but his impact has belied those optics and then some for a Boilermaker team that as of the first week of January was riding an 11-game winning streak and surging toward the top 10 nationally, a run that began with that Arizona game.
It wouldn’t be overstatement to call Haarms one of the most impactful newcomers in college basketball. Maybe not the one with the best numbers or the greatest name recognition, but one who’s been of the most value to his team, for certain.
Purdue came into 2017-18 with uncertainty at center behind Isaac Haas, exacerbated by veteran Jacquil Taylor idling in October over injury concerns.
Haarms has erased that question, turned it into an exclamation point actually.
Additionally, he’s almost single-handedly taken Purdue from one level to another defensively.
He’s averaging better than three blocked shots per game, and because of it, it took Purdue just a dozen games to exceed its blocked-shots total from all of last season.
“It’s the A.J. effect,” point guard P.J. Thompson said, referring to former Big Ten Defensive Player-of-the-Year A.J. Hammons. “I don’t know if he’s quite as good defensively as (Hammons) was yet, but he’s pretty freaking close.”
Meanwhile, Haarms’ mobility and activity and length have served as ideal counterbalances to areas defensively where the enormous Haas struggles due to the realities of his dimensions. Haarms runs and slides laterally like a player a foot shorter, to the point that Purdue will use him to switch screens, with length enough to envelope opposing ball-handlers if they’re not careful. When Purdue closed out a narrow win over Northwestern in Mackey Arena in December, Thompson funneled point guard Bryant McIntosh baseline, into Haarms, who swallowed up the play and forced one of the Big Ten's premiere guards into a crucial turnover.
In effect, Haarms has completed Purdue, covering up a question mark on the depth chart and a vulnerability on defense. Purdue might be fine on defense without Haarms playing at this level; it would not rank in the top 10 nationally in efficiency, a development that couldn’t have been expected but has certainly been welcomed, the same way Haarms’ impact couldn’t have been expected, but has certainly been welcomed.
He enrolled mid-year last January after his career at Sunrise Christian Academy in Kansas was cut short by eligibility issues stemming from his age. When Purdue learned his eligibility clock had been set off, he sat out the first half or so of Sunrise’s season, then shipped off to West Lafayette in January to redshirt, spending the next few months getting abused in practice by All-American Caleb Swanigan, an unreasonably physical player and never one to pull punches upon detection of weakness.
“My bruises have bruises,” Haarms once told Coach Matt Painter last season.
He took more from Swanigan than just welts, however.
Haarms says his defining memory from last season was this: Happening by the weight room the night of Purdue’s overtime loss to Minnesota in Game 2 of the Big Ten season, finding Swanigan on the StairMaster a few hours after scoring 28 points and grabbing 22 rebounds against the Gophers.
“It was about 10 p.m. at night,” Haarms said. “That just showed me how much work it takes. You might see him on TV and think it comes naturally, but I have never seen a guy work that hard. It was such an eye-opening experience for me. If I want to be great like him, then I need to put in the work like he does.”
That lesson might have crystalized in that moment, but the seeds were sewn earlier, during Haarms’ stint at Sunrise Christian, near Wichita.
The native of the Netherlands came to the U.S. after a spell playing for a club team in Spain — the organization that refused to allow him to play center despite his height, forcing him to cultivate his uncommon versatility — in order to pursue American college basketball.
That path took him to Sunrise, which has seen numerous international players thrive in its program, Buddy Hield among them.
It was there, Haarms has said, that he began to grasp the work ethic that’s served him well to this point for Purdue.
“I think he’s said that he grew a lot with his toughness and how hard he had to play when he was with us and with me, and I knew that’s who he was, and that that would follow him,” Sunrise Christian coach Luke Barnwell said.
“He’s a kid who really wants to be a great player, so when he started seeing that growth during his time here, it was, ‘All right, let’s go.’ That really sunk in him with him. I knew that’s who he’d be (at Purdue).”
At Purdue, Haarms’ work ethic during his redshirt season drew comparisons in the same breath to that of Swanigan, he of the obsessive, almost robotic drive. Haarms flashed in practice the effort that has made him successful this season, doing so in impossible situations against Swanigan or Haas, knowing for absolute certain he would not be playing alongside them in the games he was helping them prepare for.
In training, Haarms was known to smile and dub grueling workouts “fun” in the moment and now fondly remembers sports performance coach Josh Bonhotal’s redshirt-season message of, “You might tell me you don’t feel well, but I won’t care,” as he remembers it.
Off the court, he spent last season hoarding in his locker scouting reports for games he wouldn’t be playing in. He still has them, and the stack gets thicker with every game that passes. He has a “nice little shelf for them,” though, so they’re well taken care of, however unneeded they may be.
“I knew that we played some teams twice,” Haarms said, “so I didn’t want to be that guy who threw his away when it was time to bring them back out.”
That sort of sums up Haarms, beyond the height and length and surprising offensive skill, stifling defense and unexpectedly physical rebounding, but rather the conscientiousness, effort and zeal, the player who always seems to be smiling, who throws fists in celebration with such authority you wonder if he might be jeopardizing a labrum.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever played with anyone who’s so positive,” Thompson said. “I’ve had a lot of great teammates in my life, but he might be the most positive one I’ve ever played with. He’s such a good teammate and those are the kinds of guys you need and the kinds of guys I want to play with.”
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Purdue found a good one, a good one who might be turning himself into a great one, the next in the line of outstanding big men to come through the program.
And it found him basically by sheer luck.
Painter and his coaches cast a wide net in their search for a post player for the 2017 recruiting class, a field that came to include Texan Isiah Jasey, who played at Sunrise Christian, too.
There, Painter and then-assistant coach Jack Owens noticed Haarms. He was hard to miss, being 7-3 — but barely physically developed enough to qualify as multi-dimensional at that time — and all.
At the time, though, he was particularly unproven, having played just a single season in America, producing modest numbers.
“It took him a little bit of time (to adjust to American basketball), to be honest, and that’s not uncommon for European kids, especially bigs,” Barnwell said, “because there’s less space in our game than the European game. It’s more physical in some aspects, and it took him a while to adjust to that — the speed, the space, the athleticism, the physicality. And he had to gain some weight, which he did here and has even more (at Purdue).
“But I also had to adjust to his ability and the things he could do that were different than the other bigs we had. We kind of figured out ways to incorporate what he could do offensively, along with his length and versatility and the way he moved, and once that sort of meshed, he was really good for us. It was probably after Christmas he made a really big jump for us.”
Haarms was a reserve, playing behind Jasey, who wound up at Texas A&M, though he’d done enough in Year 1 at Sunrise and in sparse opportunities for the Chauncey Billups Elite summer program to draw offers from Washington State, Colorado, Vanderbilt and others.
During a September trip to Kansas to check in on Jasey, Purdue visited with Haarms.
There was an immediate and unexpected connection, as Haarms told Purdue about, well, Purdue.
While Haarms was growing up in Amsterdam, a television package then known as Sport1 broadcast American college basketball games in March on one of its channels, NCAA Tournament games. It was around 2010 — Purdue’s Big Ten championship season — that he saw E’Twaun Moore, JaJuan Johnson, etc., play.
“I just remember them being a really good team,” Haarms says now. “The name ‘Boilermaker’ stuck with me, because in sports it’s always just a ‘Bulldog’ or ‘Bobcat’ or something like that. I asked my dad what a Boilermaker was. It struck me as being interesting.”
The brand resonated with Haarms when he moved to the U.S. and with it eventually came an understanding of Purdue’s reputation for developing big men. Haarms mentioned Hammons to Painter in that first meeting, too.
He didn’t quite recruit Purdue when its coaches visited his school, but he definitely put out a vibe, one way or another.
“He just thought that was the ideal place for him, because of our development of big guys,” Painter said. “He’s an intelligent person, a very, very intelligent person, and sometimes intelligent people, coaching them, they know a lot, think a lot and process things. It really came out in that first meeting.
“He was impressed with us, but we walked away impressed with him.”
This was September. Soon after, he was in West Lafayette for a football weekend official visit. On Oct. 4, he was committed.
To hear Painter tell it, it sounds as if Purdue’s coach is almost remorseful to have pulled in a recruit that other schools dedicated more time and effort into pursuing. He’s been on the other end of it, he’ll tell you, and he’s too respectful of other coaches to not feel for them, to some extent.
But he’ll get over it.
With every shot Haarms turns away, with every jaw-dropping, NBA-résumé step-back jumper the towering big man sticks, with every contested rebound he grabs and every two-handed dunk he finishes rolling to the rim — and most importantly, with every game he helps those Boilermakers win — Purdue’s coach’s conscience needles him less and less.
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