Purdue Basketball: Morton's senior season heads towards its end

Ethan Morton is in the last locker on the right when you exit the Pistons locker room that Purdue is using for the Sweet Sixteen. It might not be a coincidence. Jaden Ivey, who came to Purdue in the same class as Ethan Morton has spent the last two years playing for the Pistons after being taken top-five in the NBA Draft.

Some stories are better than fiction.

Morton is always bigger than you think he is. He has wide shoulders, and he's put a lot of work into his body to transform into a 6-6, long armed defensive mercenary for hire.

But Morton, he's found himself without a role as Purdue's made its way into the NCAA Tournament.

"You can tell when a guy is happy or unhappy," Fletcher Loyer told me a couple months ago. We're talking about Ethan Morton. Morton's minutes are waning even then. They've waned from since his freshman year really when he caught mono, and then his sophomore year when an offense that was once supposed to be his turned into top-five NBA pick Jaden Ivey's.

It wasn't anyone's fault. It just happened.

Then his shot completely abandoned him his junior year after a strong start and all that space Morton was used to using to create points for other players started to look more like a taunt to a player whose basketball IQ doesn't allow him a break.

Credit to Morton, he transformed himself from brilliant ball distributor to defensive stopper in his four years at Purdue. He's still calculated on the floor, but he's also long, and smart.

But in his senior year at Purdue, Purdue is back in the Sweet Sixteen, and in two of its most convincing tournament wins in program history, Morton only got onto the floor after the game was decided.

It would be easy for each of those seasons to compile together and create tumors of resentment. It would be easy to check out, emotionally, mentally, or actually. It’s never been easier to do so for college players.

Instead, there's not a player in Purdue's locker room that doesn't credit Morton for the team's success.

Morton thought he screwed it up. No chance Matt Painter was gonna offer him a scholarship after watching that performance.

"The one at home I remember was right before he offered me and I remember thinking after the game," Morton told me last season. "He's probably not going to recruit me anymore because I think I didn't even score ten points. But we won."

That's almost exactly how Matt Clement remembers it. Clement was Morton's high school coach and someone Morton sees as a second father. Clement should be a familiar name to sports fans. He was a pitcher in the MLB for more than a decade. He's also from a town in Pennsylvania. Butler, the same town that Ethan Morton was born. When Clement's playing days were over, he went back to basketball, and started coaching high school where he met and mentored Morton. He was the head coach when Painter made his first trip to see Morton play in person.

He also had the benefit of seeing the game from the same perspective as Painter - as a coach who had long admired Morton's intangibles.

"I believe the night Coach Painter saw him play his first game - I'm almost positive he shot two shots in the first half," Clement told me trying to recollect the particulars. "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."

"I remember Painter coming back afterwards and he was outside the office. He had kept his stats for the game. I think he ended up shooting 9 shots for the game."

"To put it in perspective, the day the head coach was gonna see him play for the first time in a high school game, he shows up at that game and he doesn't force anything."

Clement echoes something to me that sounds a lot like what Purdue players have been telling me about Morton all season.

"You're only that way if winning is the most important thing to you," Clement said, summarizing a kid that wasn't old enough to drive a car at the time.

There's a war waging in Morton's chest between Morton the winner and Morton the competitor.

"It's hard," Morton told me Thursday when I asked about the duality of feelings as his team keeps winning while he keeps falling further out of the rotation. "If you take the competitive piece out of it, it's a lot easier because you can just sit back and be happy for everybody. And obviously we have a great group so it makes it easy to celebrate everybody's successes. But as a competitor it makes it hard. I think people would probably question me more if I wasn't as upset because they'd be like well you're not a competitor... but at the same time, we're getting ready to do something special here that's hopefully never been done before. So you just gotta swallow your pride and help these guys as much as you can, and just understand, it's not your time. But in the future, down the line, it's not the end. You know it's not the end for me, and that kinda helps me."

COVID has allowed players to take another year, and Morton is the last class that gets to take advantage of that. He's right. This isn't necessarily the end of his career, but Purdue's over the scholarship limit by one with six recruits incoming next season.

But we don't have to sully this chapter with that kind of talk. After all, everyone knows where Morton's career is headed.

"When the coaches started recruiting him," Clement told me. "The common question was 'What do you want to major in?' and like four or five of them said, 'Other than being a college basketball coach.'"

Before setting his sights on bringing Painter March glory, Morton had something to do for his community, his first Matt coach.

"It was really cool," Morton said. "Obviously it doesn't compare a ton to back here but for us, going back to that, the state playoffs are structured really different... We hadn't won a district championship since Matt [Clement] was in high school. So it was like thirty some years. And then before we'd only won two in the early 1900's. So it was really special."

Butler is a lot like West Lafayette, both Clement and Morton tell me at different times throughout their retelling of this story, and how Morton ended up at Purdue. It was part of what attracted Morton to Purdue. The community vibe helped Morton feel at home in West Lafayette.

Butler had been starving for the same validation that Purdue now is. It has a head coach from there, that played there, and a player that wanted to win it for his head coach more than himself.

But it wasn't just the city that reminded him of home.

"The thing I loved about Paint was the thing I loved about Matt [Clement] when I first met him. Like nothing is forced. Like when I first met Coach Clement, I was playing with his son in elementary school. There was never pressure to just stay or do this or that. He let me and my family figure it out on our own."

"Giving us suggestions but not forcing anything, and I think that was the biggest thing about Coach Paint, just talking to him. It was never 'you've gotta come here.' It was just sometimes we'd just talk. Sometimes we wouldn't even talk about me coming here. We'd just talk about basketball or things we saw. We'd just talk. I think that was the best thing about how our relationship was built organically compared to some other coaches - it was just so natural."

"I just wanna win this for coach."

"I wanted to win it for him because everyone's gonna say what a failure it was for him. Like this great player never won."

Those are Ethan Morton's words. They're from last year when I first started to talk to him about Butler, about Purdue, about Clement, and Painter.

Time doesn't exist in those words. They were meant for Clement, and winning that District championship that Morton says still brings a smile to his face.

But Morton mentions it before I even have to ask about the parallels with Purdue and its pursuit of post season glory. Those words are also for Painter, and Zach Edey, Morton's best friend, and Purdue, which is as starving for a Final Four as that city in Pennsylvania was for a District title.

The magic of March is the misery of it. Player's stories don't end with the final buzzer. They'll go on and be players elsewhere and doctors and Morton's story will end up with him being a head coach.

But this season's story will be written and if it's a story about Morton, it deserves to end with a win.