Young players' embracing of roles has been critical to Purdue's upswing
When Eric Hunter subbed in for Nojel Eastern against Maryland at the start of December, Anthony Cowan’s eyes lit up, may as well have popped out of his head.
Given a reprieve from fighting one of the Big Ten’s best perimeter defenders in Eastern, Cowan went right at his freshman replacement, a deficient defender at that stage of his career.
Hunter never really had to guard anyone prior to college. Now, now things were very different, and life came at him fast, as the commercial says.
Cowan cleared Hunter out, and drove right past him.
“I think the Maryland game opened my eyes,” Hunter now says, almost two months later. “I got the Anthony Cowan assignment and I just didn’t do what I was supposed to do, and I didn’t play that much, I think six or seven minutes. That opened my eyes.”
This past weekend, on Sunday, Hunter subbed in for Eastern again, this time against one of the country’s best point guards, and probably the midseason frontrunner for Big Ten Player-of-the-Year, Cassius Winston.
The outcome was very different. For the second time this season, Hunter held his own against the best the league has to offer at the position.
“My dad’s always told me that defense is a decision,” Hunter said. “If you want to guard somebody, you’re going to guard them. It’s about focus. I watch a lot of film now, especially the guys I’m going to guard.”
Framing Hunter’s showing from Sunday against that Maryland game in early December underscores not only the player’s development, but in a broader sense, Purdue’s.
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Back in December, Purdue won that Maryland game, but it was the only win the Boilermakers earned during a stretch of five straight games against top-25-caliber competition and came in the midst of a non-conference season in which they were winless against high-major opponents.
Today, the Boilermakers have won eight of their last nine. They’ve moved back into the top 25 and not only positioned themselves to make the NCAA Tournament, but also compete for a Big Ten title if they continue trending as they’ve been.
Last week, when asked about his team’s upswing, Matt Painter cited as a contributing factor his team’s bench, which is to say its young players, how they’ve grasped a better understanding of how they can help Purdue win.
That’s reflected in Hunter’s defensive awakening, but in others, too.
For many young players, the transition from high school alpha to college supporting actor is just that — a transition.
The sharpness of that transition might have been dulled to some extent for Aaron Wheeler, since he came off the bench for a prep school team rich in high-end talent, then redshirted at Purdue last season, with front-row seats for a team that won a school-record 30 games in large part due to its role-definition and substance, however you want to define substance.
Still, Wheeler came into the season figuring it was his job to score, and to do so at first opportunity.
“Early on, I knew I wasn’t going to be playing the bulk of the minutes, so I’d try to get my offense going quicker,” Wheeler said. “I’ve come to realize that if I just sprint up and down, get a couple rebounds, get some offensive rebounds, the offense will come. That’s been working. I’ve changed my mindset throughout the season.
“I’ve realized that if I’m doing those little things, open shots will come if I’m playing hard.”
Sunday, they did, and Wheeler has worn opportunism well, now ranking second in the Big Ten in three-point percentage, 48 percent on 25 attempts.
Wheeler’s three first-half three-pointers made a key difference in the Boilermakers’ win over sixth-ranked Michigan State. But on Sunday, and in some of Purdue’s other key wins of late, Wheeler’s sprinted the floor for put-backs or found ways to leverage his ample physical gifts to make plays on the defensive end.
“It’s about feeling good about your value to the team and not feeling you need to do too much when you play 14-15 minutes,” Painter said of his team’s young reserves. “A lot of times players playing (limited) minutes want to get it all done in a short amount of time because they know they’re not going to play as much, so they try to please you by overdoing things, shooting shots they shouldn’t shoot, then they don’t play well, and it ends up hurting their minutes. They’ve let some things come to them.”
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Sasha Stefanovic, like Wheeler, redshirted last season after coming to Purdue known as a jump-shooter but eager to prove himself as more.
Though he’s never seemed to force offense, to hunt shots, as coaches would say, he has embraced a different role than those he’s played in the past, whether it be as Crown Point High School’s leading scorer or Romeo Langford’s wing man in AAU.
“Sasha’s always trying to take charges,” center Matt Haarms said.
Improving on defense is a significant priority for Stefanovic, and for the time being at least, that’s been part of the niche he’s trying to carve for himself, another example of a young player redefining himself to a certain extent for the sake of the collective.
Stefanovic is a jump-shooter by trade, but one who's gotten one or fewer shots in four of the past five games. Purdue obviously wants him capitalizing on opportunities that may arise in that area, but if they don't, that's fine, too. Carsen Edwards and Ryan Cline — the Nos. 1 and 2 highest-volume three-point-shot-makers in the Big Ten — will make their share.
“It’s obviously different now,” Stefanovic said. “Coach Painter always says, ‘Play within your role,’ and, ‘Be great within your role.’ And a lot of people on our team were thrown into a new role. It is different, having to get used to playing off the bench and coming in energy because you might not be playing for a long, extended period of time. For me personally it took a little while to get used to. You have to be ready to play no matter what. It was definitely an adjustment.”
Asked what he believes has changed for Purdue, leading to this abrupt improvement and reversal of fortunes, Hunter said, “We all just kind of got over ourselves, realizing it was bigger than us. We’re playing for Ryan (Cline) and Grady (Eifert), because they don’t get another crack at some of these dudes. They don’t get to play IU at home again. We think about stuff like that, and we all just want to win. It makes everything so much better. We’ve put individual agendas out of the way and just started getting the job done.”
They “got over themselves,” Hunter says, echoing verbatim Painter’s press conference spiel following his team’s bottoming out vs. Notre Dame at the Crossroads Classic, arguably the low point of Purdue’s season to date.
Since that considerable letdown in Indianapolis, Purdue has played nine games, and won eight of them. Seven of those wins have come by double-digits, the other being the watershed moment that was Purdue’s overtime win at Wisconsin, a victory that seemed to exorcise some Boilermaker road-and close-game demons.
“I think you can see it on the floor, that we’re having a lot more fun, playing a lot looser,” Stefanovic said. “Coach Painter always says, ‘Have fun doing your job.’ We’re having fun and winning.”
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