As Purdue ventures back to the road for its tallest task yet — visiting No. 19 Michigan Thursday night — its challenges playing away from Mackey Arena this season again come to the forefront.
And they lie squarely on offense, where the Boilermakers are a few days removed from scoring 37 points on 25-percent shooting at Illinois Sunday. The latter number was a historical low for Purdue; the former may as well have been, considering that 1949 was a long time ago.
Purdue's 1-3 in true road games this season, 0-2 in the Big Ten. On opponents' home floors, the Boilermakers are averaging 54.3 points, that number prettied up by a 69-point showing at Mid-American Conference member Ohio University.
Struggling on the road certainly doesn't make Purdue much different from pretty much everyone else in the Big Ten this year, but that hardly makes it any more palatable for the Boilermakers.
In road games, Purdue's shooting 33.7 percent overall. In its two Big Ten losses, it was roughly 30 percent at Nebraska, then 25 at Illinois. Purdue's shooting 23.4 percent from three-point range on the road and has missed half its free throws, on 54 attempts.
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How it's all happened has been confounding for Purdue, from a second-half dry spell at Marquette punctuated by particularly poor foul shooting, to profound struggles at Nebraska and Illinois to finish high-percentage shots right at the basket.
"I've seen us get so many shots at the rim and just miss 'em," center Matt Haarms said. "It's just about continuing to work, and that's what we've done, because I'm confident that if we continue to get shots at the rim, we're going to make them."
That Purdue hasn't has been an issue Matt Painter often brought up, not solely because of the productivity missed out on but because of how a team can react to such things.
"You really test someone's mental toughness when you miss open shots and open layups to continue to play hard, and do your job and fight somebody," Painter said. "You have to always fight, and we didn't have a good enough fight (at Illinois) to win. Our inability to make a shot didn't help either but no matter whether the ball's going in or not, you have to be competitive and try to beat the guy in front of you. We just didn't have that."
And that's where Purdue suggests that the path to the solution to its offensive difficulties on the road may Iie separate from offense altogether.
"Just let defense be the focus," guard Eric Hunter said. "I think we know as a team we don't do as well offensively on the road.
"It would be good to turn (more) defense into offense, get some transition buckets, and just see the ball go in."
It didn't help Purdue at Illinois that amidst a historically poor shooting night, it didn't overcome its percentages with volume of opportunity, where last year's team excelled. It didn't turn the ball over much, but it was also an excellent offensive rebounding team. Those things added up.
"Every loose ball, they were on it and we weren't," Haarms said of Illinois. "That's a big one — just playing harder."
And smarter, Painter said.
"It goes to a lot of things," Painter said, specifically of the offensive struggles at Illinois. "To passing, to being ready to shoot, to taking shots you practice. There were probably five or six shots we took that you just absolutely wouldn't take unless the shot clock horn is going off and we're taking them when it's not going off. Whatever shots you take, those should be shots you practice every single day."
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