Today, GoldandBlack.com continues a new weekly feature. We're calling it the Weekly Word.

Why? Because it has words, it's posted weekly and we're just that unimaginative. (Actual feedback from Week 1: Definitely like the content, but a new name would be useful.)

Anyway, here are some random thoughts for the week, most of which will be Purdue-related.

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As Purdue's grown into being a pretty good team right now, you're also seeing the seeds sewn for some pretty good teams to follow, what with the play of Trevion Williams and Matt Haarms and Nojel Eastern and on down the line lately, players who'll be centerpieces of the next two Boilermaker teams after this one.

But you're also seeing some knowns for those teams being established where there were unknowns for this team.

Namely, leadership.

If you want to give Matt Painter and his staff credit for something, give them credit for this: This was a season Purdue entered into with significant unknowns, and I'd go so far as to say concerns, regarding leadership, with a small and understated senior class moving now into the most prominent roles of their careers, a ton of newcomers and the reality that its most leadership-driven players were young.

That said, leadership may have been required from the sideline more than it has in years, after Painter has had a few teams prior to this one that essentially were able to coach themselves to a certain extent.

But Purdue is quickly transitioning from having unknowns in the leadership column to the opposite extreme.

Nojel Eastern and Matt Haarms are going to be a great leaders for Purdue, if you ask me. I'm not sure I can properly articulate why, aside from both having the charisma, personalities and consciences for it, not to mention them being solid example-setters from work ethic and effort perspectives best I can tell.

But a couple other examples brought it to mind in the past 24 hours or so.

First, Haarms.

Look, no one is — or should be — required to play the media dog-and-pony show game if they don't want to, but it is an opportunity, not only to reflect things as positively on yourself and your team as possible when given the opportunity, but to lead.

What people don't always realize when athletes or coaches speak to the media is that they're not just talking to the rank-and-file observer, but also to everyone they share a locker room with.

Here's a golden example of doing it the right way.

Eastern, a guard, was asked a question about guard play, and answered. Then, Haarms raised an index finger and chimed in about Carsen Edwards, fresh off a 6-of-20 shooting game.

"I wanted to say this, as well," he said. "I was really proud of Carsen's maturity today. He struggled in the first half, and some guys would let themselves get taken out of the game by that, but he was out there in the second half leading us. He was going at them, one of the guys out there really showing us we had to go at these dudes. I'm really proud of him for that."

That's Haarms going out of his way to make mention of his team's best player, praising in public, understanding of the gravity Edwards carries on this team, seemingly aware of the importance of a message being sent that teammates have his back, so to speak, no matter what.

Press conferences are golden opportunities for such things, but nowadays, every hour of every day can be a press conference, because of social media.

Matt Painter didn't ban his players from Twitter for several years because he didn't trust them, but because he wanted to protect them from the barbs of either degenerates or smart people who turn into degenerates during basketball games, and in turn, protect them from themselves. No good can come from online fisticuffs with unknown and irrelevant adversaries.

But there's opportunity in Twitter same as there is in press conferences, only without the intellectually stimulating questions.

A few hours after Haarms used one platform to publicly praise his team's most important player after an uneven game, Eastern used another to praise team manager Jacob Rossman for the time he's put in helping him improve his foul shooting, but bigger than that, how much he cares.

People have no idea, generally, how much managers do for the programs they help make run, and very rarely is light shown on those contributions.

Hours after a big win, during a stretch in which Eastern has much to beat his own chest over, for him to use his platform to shine some of that light, it really tells you what you should know about Nojel Eastern.

Ultimately, what is leadership?

Leadership is thinking beyond oneself.

Some have to.

But some want to, or just know to, like Haarms and Eastern did on Sunday, giving pretty strong reason to believe that Purdue's going to be in capable hands for the foreseeable future.

On that note, it has come to mind lately how leadership and selflessness begets leadership and selflessness.

And while some of that is something people either have or they don't, there's been an excellent example laid in place at Purdue.

Namely in the leadership of past captains Vincent Edwards, Dakota Mathias and P.J. Thompson.

Consider how their careers played out. All were excellent players and winners in their Boilermaker careers, but all played nice with others.

Does Caleb Swanigan's career at Purdue play out as successfully if the Boilermakers' established players don't accommodate him so smoothly? Hell, Vincent Edwards changed positions for him after a terrific freshman season of his own.

Does Carsen Edwards' career at Purdue play out as successfully had Mathias or Vincent Edwards not been understanding of him getting 120-some more shots than any other Boilermaker as a sophomore on a team full of seniors? I don't know if people ever understood how good those guys were and what they might have been capable of had they ever been The Man, at Purdue or anywhere.

Purdue added starpower on the fly to a team with a great foundation in place, but that foundation being comfortable in its foundation-ness was such an important part of those teams' success, and laid a hell of a, well, foundation for years to come.

In the big picture of Purdue's surprising success this season, don't lose sight of that mattering.

So it's sort of being a running joke for Purdue, yet no laughing matter, that it has this funny way of pinning 20 percentage points onto opponents' three-point percentages as if it's the tail on the donkey.

Texas, Notre Dame, Penn State, whoever, the numbers go right out the window as the ball goes right through the net.

There is some sound reasoning involved.

Purdue does prioritize keeping the ball out of the paint — it's almost poetic that the Boilermakers' coach puts such emphasis on the, uh, lane — whether that's in helping against the dribble or double-teaming against post-ups. There is some anecdotal evidence of Purdue's systematic priorities making bad shooting teams good, but not enough to be the sole cause.

The Michigan State-Indiana game illuninated the real reason, as the Spartans missed all their free throws and Hoosiers made seemingly all their (important) threes: It's the luck of the draw.

Jump-shooting is like pitching in baseball, the randomness that makes the game fun and all the clichés — anyone can beat anyone on any ... — true.

Especially in the college game, where things are so much rougher around the edges, a good shooting team can be awful and an awful shooting team can be good.

If Penn State just shoots its pedestrian average vs. Purdue, Purdue doesn't need overtime to beat the worst team in the league and we all go to bed a little earlier.

If Purdue shoots its average vs. Minnesota, then it rolls over the Gophers, then we have so much less to talk about afterward, don't we?

Funny business, these coaches and players are in, preparing to play opponents armed only with information culled from results of the past, when all that will matter will be results in the moments, results that can fall any number of ways.

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