Matt Painter is betting big on Trey Kaufman-Renn

Zach Edey is back at Purdue. After a summer of international travel with Team Canada, and recovering from another concussion, he's also back at Purdue's practice. All 7 feet 4 inches of him, and there's something about watching a player that good and that big return to something as modest as an early season practice. At nearly 300 lbs., he's enough to hold up Purdue's floor. Purdue will win the Big Ten again. That's never been the problem.

Edey is rolling to the rim, hard, and though Purdue has a bevy of big men to throw at him, they're struggling. Edey doesn't just roll to the rim, he submerges into it, casting a wake of bodies to the left and right of him. Mason Gillis is strong, Caleb Furst is fast, but not even collectively can they stem the tide of Edey. They can hack him, and they do, and coach Matt Painter blows a whistle. It's not often Painter gives his big man the benefit of the doubt, but these are late game situations and, well, even Painter can't pretend to not see that one.

Purdue to the line. Free points for an offense at the end of the game.

Edey's 22.3 points per game and 12.9 rebounds last season on his way to being college basketball's player of the year was enough to turn Purdue's up and coming, rebuilding team into a perennial powerhouse. It was enough to announce Matt Painter as the next Jay Wright just waiting for the right March to erase the last asterisk on his resume. That's what great players do - they turn hyperboles into promises.

But as much of an eraser as Zach Edey could be on the court, his team fell to #16 Fairleigh Dickinson. It wasn't gonna be that March after all.

Zach Edey's return for his senior season sets Purdue to make up and make good on all that surprising promise shown last year.

But that asterisk, those March games, even someone as big as Zach Edey can't carry that kind of burden alone.

Cue the brilliant Matt Painter, the basketball coach who lives in one of the strangest bubbles of devotion and derision from national media and fans. His solution for Purdue's March issues is one that is perfectly on brand, which will add fodder to both sides of the argument. In a basketball landscape that is going smaller, with a history of losing to smaller teams, Painter has a solution.

Go bigger.

"Trey Kaufman is gonna play," Assistant Coach PJ Thompson tells me after a practice last week. "He's gonna play more than he did in the past."

The past was last season, Trey Kaufman-Renn's first for Purdue on the court after redshirting his true freshman year. The Sellersburg big man struggled out of the gate, looking uncomfortable and out of place with inconsistent minutes and a unclear role. He was 38 of 84 from the floor in his first 20 games of the season, but he had moments. When Zach Edey was sick and had to sit for his first game as a Boilermaker, it was Kaufman-Renn that played the focal point of the offense against New Orleans. Kaufman-Renn would go 8 of 10 from the floor and score 24 points in his only start.

It was an early flash for a big man that grew into his game throughout the season, mixing his elite but unorthodox foot work with a physicality that allowed him to get to his right hand where he displayed incredible touch for a big man. Kaufman-Renn was 20 of 33 from the field in the last 15 games of the season.

If Edey holds up Purdue's floor, Matt Painter is betting on Kaufman-Renn being able to push up its ceiling.

Throughout the off season Painter has talked about March. What happened, why it happened, and inevitably, what he can do to prevent it from happening again.

While it won't be just one thing that unlocks a program's entire history of March misfortune, Kaufman-Renn offers what Purdue lost towards the end of last year - confidence and scoring.

Kaufman-Renn takes a second to answer. He's a philosophy major, Kaufman-Renn, a thinker. He answers succinctly, shockingly so for that fact, but not so shocking is that he doesn't necessarily find anything surprising about what he's been asked to do.

"Surprising? No," he tells me. "But I would say you're definitely learning. He's such a unique player."

The pronoun is Zach Edey, and the question is about playing with him. Has it been surprising, playing alongside someone so big, so impactful? Kaufman-Renn has been the best post player on every team he's been on until he got to Purdue. But it's not hard, at least not on the floor, to adjust to someone like Edey.

"It's actually really easy," he tells me, and then dives into it. "Like it's a basic type of game. We're gonna get him post touches and I'm gonna try to blast from the other side. It's actually easier playing with him. Or well, it's simple playing with him."

That's the rub. It's not just the matter of occupying space with Edey or getting the second best post defender, or finding the spots on the court. Those are all, objectively, simple things. Especially for someone as sharp as Kaufman-Renn. But it's different, and he's acknowledged that the on court stuff, as easy as it is, requires some internal pivoting.

"The toughest part is going from a primary option to a secondary option," Kaufman-Renn told me. "Last practice with him was fun. We got a lot of post to post passes, it was great. It's fine once you get in there playing but it is a mentality switch. If Zach's not in the game I'm pretty much the go to guy on offense. So you're looking to score every time you touch the ball. Where now we got to get this guy touches."

The plan, as it seems, is to leverage Kaufman-Renn's remarkable mesh of basketball skills. He's an absolute brute at the rim, or as Ethan Morton put it, "He's a load at the rim," but as Morton also added. "He's super skilled." Kaufman-Renn has shown a willingness and ability to knock down threes all summer between Europe games and scrimmages after going just 5 of 20 from three last season.

Painter is counting on that offensive fire power next to the nation's best player as a way to prevent his offense from stalling late in the season again or against quicker teams. Speaking of quicker, Kaufman-Renn has been working on that. Last year, Painter said he didn't do a good job of getting Kaufman-Renn prepared to defend the four.

Now, Kaufman-Renn is in a place where he's more tired after practices. That's a good thing.

"I was actually telling some of the coaches, I'm more tired now than I was then," he told me. "But the biggest thing is because I'm in better shape now. So I'm able to do things defensively that I wasn't... I'd say I'm miles ahead of last year."

There's a lot of things Purdue still has to do, some places it hasn't been, and Matt Painter is betting big that Trey Kaufman-Renn can help get them there.