I am curious for a few of your opinions that are non Purdue fans on what you think Paint should do with his philosophy, stay the course or make tweaks or significant change how the team looks. I have my opinion, but I will share that later as to not bias your feedback or thoughts, not that any of you would change an opinion because of what I say!
I read an article on a Purdue site that I thought hit the nail on the head.
Purdue BB does their thing and they do it REALLY well as evidenced by Painter's enviable regular season success.
The problem is that they don't seem to have much of a "plan B" for a game where someone has an off night or the opposition manages to take away their usual game plan.
That FDU upset was insane. Honestly, Purdue's second string should have been able to handle FDU with ease.
If you look at the stats, Edey got his:
The rest of the team would have needed to improve to get to awful:
- 12-42 (28.5%)
- 37 points
- 5-26 behind the line (19.2%)
Worse, Purdue's defense got torched by (checks notes) FDU. The Knights shot over 30% from three, almost 40% overall, and took nine more shots than the Boilers despite getting handily outrebounded (42-33).
Tying this back to Purdue's longstanding postseason struggles, the Tournament forces you to do multiple things well because it takes six wins to win it. No matter what your "thing" is, you are probably going to run into somebody who figures out how to take it away and when you do, you need a viable "Plan B".
Maybe it really is as simple as that. Izzo is clearly the B1G's best tournament coach and his MSU teams always seen to have a few early or mid-season losses that are head scratchers in that it seems like MSU us a much better team and *should* have won. Maybe a lot of that is Izzo testing out his "Plan B, C, D, etc".
Just my $0.02.
