Breakdown: Purdue's win over Indiana

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A few minutes after Purdue ended its regular season with an imperfect but businesslike 67-58 dispatching over rival Indiana, Matt Painter could finally congratulate his team for something big-picture.

"I told them it was a championship effort," Painter said of the regular season.

Last season, Maryland, Michigan State and Wisconsin shared the Big Ten title with 14-6 league records.

Purdue didn't win the Big Ten this season, but had the postponed Nebraska game been played, chances are it would have finished with that same record that a year earlier was good for a title. With the win Saturday, Purdue will be no worse than the 4 seed to the Big Ten Tournament, possibly the 3.

"For the youngest team in the league," Painter said, "that's something to build off."

In the toughest conference in America, no less.

The Boilermakers have leaned heavily on their freshman class all season, and with that in mind, Purdue's ninth consecutive win over Indiana was a fitting conclusion to the regular season.

In the final 15 minutes of play Saturday, as Purdue worked to put a stubborn Indiana team away, all but two of the Boilermakers' points came from freshmen, as Zach Edey (20 points) and Jaden Ivey (17 points) totaled 37 between them. Trevion Williams' basket two-and-a-half minutes into the second half was Purdue's only field goal of the second half aside from its freshmen and redshirt freshmen.

And when Aaron Wheeler was fouled with just under six minutes left — he made both free throws, accounting for Purdue's only non-freshman crunch-time scoring — it was because Edey was trampling the Hoosiers so badly, Wheeler was wide open to dive to the rim.

Edey scored 12 of Purdue's final 20 points, dominating winning time for the second game in a row. This was virtually a carbon copy of his performance against Wisconsin.

"I was getting good position down low, like always," Edey said. "And when I get good position, it leads to good things. ... There wasn't any real magic to it. I'd either just get the ball down low and score to get free throws and score."

Same for Ivey, the emergent rookie guard who lit up Indiana's dribble-resistant defense for 17 points on 6-of-9 shooting, his most efficient offensive game to date.

"We're in a great position," Ivey said. "This game, it's hard to beat a team twice. It shows how much work we've put in, coming off COVID and the off-season.To be the 4 seed to the Big Ten Tournament, everybody doubted us from the beginning, but we never gave in to that. We just kept improving every game."

Back in the summer, Sasha Stefanovic would screencap various rankings and whatnot suggesting all that's been real for Purdue this season might not be so much as possible. In fairness to those prognosticators, the Boilermakers earned themselves little benefit of the doubt last season, and wound up with more questions than just about any team in the country after the team's oldest players transferred out in the spring.

"It's a big deal," Stefanovic said. "A lot of people counted us out and (we) used it for some motivation, them thinking we were going to finish ninth, 10th, 11th in the league. ... We had a great effort throughout this whole Big Ten season and now we have to take this momentum and whoever we end up playing on Friday, we just have to be ready to go, just continue to get better and continue to trend upwards."

Early in the season, Purdue leaned heavily on Zach Edey, in part because Trevion Williams opened the season relatively quietly, but also because smaller-school non-conference opponents were simply overwhelmed by the big man.

Things have come full circle now, but this isn't Liberty or Oakland or Indiana State cowering at the 7-foot-4 center's feet. It's Wisconsin and Indiana.

Edey made 8-of-10 shots Saturday and finished with 20 and nine rebounds in just 20-and-a-half minutes. He was Purdue's focal point offensively down the stretch and delivered time and again, as he did last week in that hard-fought win over Wisconsin. He scored 21 points in that game and also carried the Boilermakers when it mattered most.

"Zach's been a workhorse here coming down the stretch," Painter said.

Saturday, star big men Trevion Williams and Trayce Jackson-Davis canceled one another out.

Williams was just 3-for-4 for six points, his third single-digit scoring game in four games.

Jackson-Davis scored only 12 points on nine shots. Three other Hoosiers attempted more shots than IU's best player by a mile.

It created a situation where Edey was the best big man in a game with two first-team All-Big Ten-level players at his position.

Edey was part of the offensive spark that woke Purdue up after a dreadful offensive start.

At the first media timeout, the Boilermakers were on the verge of being down 7-0. They were 0-for-4 from the floor and had committed four turnovers in as many minutes.

Purdue didn't score until a three from Aaron Wheeler — excellent again today, with eight points and seven rebounds in 23 minutes — at 15:32. That shot tipped off an 18-4 Purdue run that seized control of the game, for good, though there were some tight moments in the second half.

They existed because Purdue turned the ball over far too much, 15 times for the game. Defensive rebounding was an issue, too, in the first half, but the Boilermakers closed that Issue off, allowing no offensive rebounds after halftime.

"The thing about taking care of the basketball is if you do a good job with that for, say, three or four games, you think, 'OK, we've gotten this taken care of,'" Painter said. "You never have that taken care of. Never. You never have boxing out and rebounding taken care of. Those are things you always have to keep working on, and sometimes when you have to work on it most is when you're winning."

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