After Fletcher Loyer drained a 3 with all the ease but also the empty consequence of a warmup shot to pull another trick on the scoreboard – just a single-digit deficit now, 75-66 – he walked straight off the court to his team’s bench, not even feigning defense before the merciful buzzer rang.
It was the third loss in a row for Loyer and the rest of the Boilermakers, this time to Michigan State, and now there is a growing list of bad numbers for this Purdue team to consider.
Loyer, a junior, has played 101 games in a Purdue uniform and never lost three in a row. He’s never lost three straight in his life, to his recollection. Same goes for fellow juniors Trey Kaufman-Renn and Braden Smith. “Crazy, isn’t it?” Smith said.
Purdue hasn’t been mired in a streak like this since 2020.
This isn’t the kind of three-straight Purdue has angled furiously for all season. The Boilers are fourth in the Big Ten, and will not win a third consecutive, outright championship (done before only twice) barring a miracle of seismic scale.
Before Tuesday night, Purdue had topped the Spartans in nine of 10 consecutive matchups, a run against Big Ten royalty that stretched back to 2019.
The last season the Boilers played without a road loss resulting in a court-storming from opposing students was 2020-2021. Those displays of schadenfreude are stuck in the past for the timebeing, reiterated time and again by players as the highest form of respect.
Braden Smith remembers.
“Everybody wants us to lose,” the junior guard said after the defeat. “I mean, I think that kind of sums it up, that everybody wants to see us lose. I think that says a lot about our program and what we've done this past couple years.”
The Boilers are off that vaunted perch now, places traded with others whose losses make the rest of the conference giddy. The teams that have beaten them will now jockey for a conference crown: Michigan, Wisconsin, Michigan State. The current crop of players, who earned a target on their backs along with stars of yesteryear, will now try to earn it back.
“Everybody’s a little bit frustrated,” Loyer said. “Nobody wants to lose, especially three in a row, especially when you have a chance to win the Big Ten. We kinda shit that away, but ultimately, the season’s not over. You have a chance to go be great in March and make a run for a championship or a Final Four.”
Such a turnaround will surely start on the defensive end.
Purdue’s defensive efficiency has slipped from ninth in the country in January to 131st in February, per analytics site Barttorvik. The result, with an offense that has chugged along near the top of college basketball all season, is a slip from an elite team in the year’s first month to a forgettable one this month.
The Spartans abused Purdue repeatedly with points of the easiest form: dunks. “You can’t go on the road and give up 10 dunks,” coach Matt Painter said.
“They ran the same couple sets over and over again and kept scoring,” Kaufman-Renn said.
Purdue knows the steps it must take to morph back into a defensive unit that pesters its opposition to frenzy.
“You got to have pressure on that basketball,” Painter said.
“Containing the ball, just talking,” freshman guard Gicarri Harris said Monday. “If we communicate more, we'll get a bunch more stops.” He added, “You can't get complacent on defense. You always got to be in a stance.”
Loyer said he and his teammates must channel their frustration, embodied in animated negotiations with officials and short sentences after losses, into an edge that propels Purdue to its potential.
For Smith, that potential is measured by the now-lost dominance he’s known since he arrived in West Lafayette.
“We still know who we are and what we've done since we've been here,” the star point guard said.
Now it’s up to Smith and the others in this strange territory with him to rediscover that identity.
