Nojel Eastern stands tall in Purdue win over Ball State
Video credit: Deep Dish Sports
Analysis ($): 3-2-1 | Wrap Video | Stat Blast
PDF: Purdue-Ball State statistics
This was basically all the best of Nojel Eastern, all the little things he did for Purdue last season, projected onto a much larger role, to the point that those little things became really, really big.
In No. 24 Purdue's 84-75 win over Ball State — a game the Boilermakers led by one at half and trailed thereafter — Eastern scored a modest 12 points. But no one influenced this game more.
Cardinal guard Tayler Persons tore Purdue up.
Except when Eastern was in the game.
Most of the Ball State point guard's 19 first-half points came in the nearly eight minutes his primary defender on the bench.
In the second half, of which Eastern spent most of the time on the floor, Persons didn't score, finishing with the same 19 points he carried into halftime.
"I was just being competitive," Eastern said, "trying to stay in his head and put pressure on him the whole game."
Persons is 6-foot-3, roughly 200 pounds, built like a linebacker, and has always been able to use his physical stature to his advantage at a position where he's an outlier.
Saturday night, he ran into one of the few guards in college basketball who can cast a shadow over him.
The value of Eastern's 6-foot-6, 220-pound dimensions really mattered for Purdue.
"He's 6-foot-6, he's an athlete and he's a really good defender," Persons said. "He has good length and he knows how to play defense. It's a credit to him. It's tough. I had to take advantage of what I had to take advantage of when other people were on me and I feel like I did that."
It was a different story against Eastern, who led all players Saturday night in plus/minus, at +26, 11 better than the next-best, teammates Evan Boudreaux and Ryan Cline.
But Eastern loomed large otherwise.
Six of his nine rebounds came off the offensive glass, pacing a Purdue rebounding effort that bested Ball State 40-29 and yielded 19 offensive rebounds, producing 22 second-chance points.
"When Nojel gets (blocked out) by point guards," Matt Painter joked, "point guards are notorious for being terrible at blocking out."
Meanwhile, his three-point play with 16:05 to play and putback with 11-and-a-half minutes left served as bookends to Purdue's game-deciding 19-2 mid-second-half run that turned a game that had previously seen the lead change hands 16 times on its side.
After Purdue led by one at the half following a back-and-forth first defined by Persons' productivity against most everyone but Eastern, Ball State was up three two minutes into the second half.
But then Eastern blocked Persons' jumper at one end, then scored in the post at the other, then threw in a runner over Persons while drawing a foul, that three-point play sparking Purdue's decisive run.
Grady Eifert — just back into the game after picking up three first-half fouls — hit Evan Boudreaux for a layup, Carsen Edwards scored on a baseline drive, then Ryan Cline and Edwards combined to make 4-of-4 at the foul line. Boudreaux's turnaround jumper at 13:05 pushed Purdue's run to 13-0 and its lead to 63-50.
Ball State scored, but then Edwards threw a dart to Boudreaux for a bucket, then Eastern scored the next trip, then rebounded for a putback the next.
The Cardinals did trim that 17-point deficit down to nine the rest of the way but got no closer, as Purdue cruised to a win in a game that profiled like a real challenge, and for 24 minutes, was.
But on top of Eastern's play and the significant edge on the glass, Purdue got 23 points from Edwards, 16 from Haarms and 14 from Boudreaux, accounting for 30 points from the center position in this year of transition at that particular spot.
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