A look at some topics around Purdue basketball following the end of summer workouts.

The important context to Purdue's surprising success last season lied in the circumstances.

Early on during the pandemic, Matt Painter theorized that last summer's off-season restrictions would be most detrimental to young players acclimating to college basketball — and college, in general — and it just so happened that at that time Purdue was prepping for one of its most freshmen-dependent seasons in quite some time, though two of those freshmen weren't new to the program.

Purdue players were fragmented from one another, restricted to contact-tracing-friendly four-man workout pods. If the whole team was ever all together — not counting Zoom or group-chat text-messaging — last off-season, it wasn't to any meaningful extent.

There were no team practices, the sorts of sessions coaches use to implement the structure of complex offensive and especially defensive schemes. Those limitations most certainly would have been evident to the trained eye during the season.

But furthermore, and arguably more importantly, Purdue — and every other team out there — was denied important bonding time.

Now, with things having returned to relative normalcy, that's where ground can be made up.