Show Me My Opponent, 2024 NCAA Tournament Elite Eight: (1) Purdue
Armageddon again
Well, here we are and here it is. Tennessee used a brilliantly-timed 18-0 run to speed past Creighton late Friday night in an 82-75 semi-thriller, a game that was played in the Sweet Sixteen. Tennessee won a game in the Sweet Sixteen. I have to keep typing it because for so long the people in this fanbase have collectively stared into the middle distance after another aborted March run, wondering if The Big One would ever come. Well, here it is, and the best team in school history’s gonna try to do something they’ve never done before. Dream baby, dream.
Purdue enters with the nation’s best player (argue, wall, etc.), 32 wins, and the largest imaginable expectations they could have. Tennessee’s never made a Final Four, but Purdue hasn’t made one in 44 years. They’ve made four Elite Eights and an astonishing 12 Sweet Sixteens in that span of time, but they haven’t touched the third weekend since Jimmy Carter was President. If they cannot do it with the Iron Giant on their team, it’s fair to wonder when they’ll ever break through.
These are two schools, two coaches, two sets of players with an irrationally large amount of narratives on both sides from people who can’t wait to pounce when one or the other falls short of their desired outcome. Of all of the games this weekend, this is the one with the highest catharsis for the winner. Whether they win by 1 or by 50, it will feel approximately like the liberation of France for the victor. The only difference is that Tennessee fans will likely feel a little less horrible after a loss but only slightly.
BEHIND THE WALL ($): If you’re reading this and in Detroit, go to my beloved Custard & Co. in Royal Oak for me. Also! This post is FREE FREE FREE. Enjoy.
Purdue’s offense
Since February 15 (11 games):
From November:
Well, this is good. Such is the fun of playing a team that’s #2 in offense nationally and whose worst performance to date was last night, a game in which they still touched 1 PPP and shot 56% on twos. The issue with these guys has pretty much never been offense, as evidenced by going 2nd-4th-50th-26th-2nd-12th-2nd the last seven years. Frighteningly it appears they might be able to really shoot it for the first time since Jaden Ivey left campus? Buckle up.
The only thing that has changed is that they fell to third offensively thanks to UConn and Illinois going supernova. They can shoot it and are the very best in America at ripping it from deep, which is as terrifying as it sounds. Last year’s Infallible Plan to Beat Purdue was to harass Edey at all costs and let the guards beat you. If harassing Edey didn’t work, teams would hard-hedge/blitz the ball screens and the ball-handler didn’t 100% know what to do. The folly of youth and all that.
Now, they are a year older and have answers to nearly every question people have asked of them. Want to single-cover Zach Edey (24.6 PPG, 12.1 RPG) in the post? He shoots 54% on these and has drawn 200+ free throw attempts.
Want to double him? Purdue scores 1.33 points per shot when he’s doubled. The Boilermakers have a truly surreal 48% 3PT% when Edey passes out of a double, which is a serious credit to how much better everything around Edey is this year. It’s also a credit to how much better Edey has gotten as a passer.
Talking about Edey in a preview sense is surprisingly pretty boring. He’s 7’4”, a giant, and is arguably the greatest post presence in modern college basketball history. At minimum, he is the most dangerous frontcourt player on a game-to-game basis since Frank Kaminsky if not Tim freakin’ Duncan. But: he’s not perfect. In the first game, Tennessee almost entirely eschewed doubling Edey in the post and went with single coverage. They generally lived to tell the tale, as Edey got just 10 points off of nine post-up possessions. It was the offensive boards where they got crushed, not in true post-ups.
Of greater interest to how UT covers Edey, though, is Edey’s problem with sneaky wings/guards. Per Synergy:
Edey in true single coverage with no help: 9.5% TO%
Edey with either a semi-double (wing provides late help) or a true double: 17.8% TO%
And the first half of that second bullet is what intrigues me. Jordan Majewski pointed out in his preview that while Edey’s gotten way better at dealing with doubles (heavily due to the rest of Purdue’s team getting way better at shooting basketballs), he struggles with late-arriving wings. I would call this a half-double. It’s like 1.5-on-1 if you look closely. Frankly it’s easy to envision someone like Josiah-Jordan James or Jahmai Mashack sneaking over and generating a turnover or two this way.
The way I’m officially looking at the matchup is that Edey will get his, but with limits. I don’t think you can let him score 35+, obviously, but if he gets 25 or something you deal with it. It’s everyone else that decides or doesn’t decide the game. In Purdue’s four losses, the non-Edey players have shot 42% from two and 34% from three. In the wins: 54% and 42%. As you already know, it all starts with Braden Smith (12.3 PPG, 7.5 APG). Smith has gone from a good-but-incomplete freshman to an All-American in Year Two because he’s become one of the very best shooters in America.
As the point, Smith doesn’t get many catch-and-shoot looks but he’s golden off the dribble, shooting 41% on midrange jumpers and 44% on all threes. Unlike last year, when you could go under the screen and dare Smith to shoot, he’s become more confident to just rip it. Edey is a huge part of every screen, too. You can’t play drop coverage against this because Smith will simply shoot over the top of it happily.
Smith loves to use and re-use the Edey screens against drop in particular, because it runs the guard out of the play for the most part and turns it into a 2-on-1 situation. Either Smith takes the jumper, or the big overcommits and Edey becomes open. It’s brutal to try and defend. Recently, teams have begun to blitz these Purdue ball screens instead of sitting back and waiting for the downhill action. This worked last year, but this year, Purdue actually scores more points per possession (1.02 versus 1, per Synergy) when the screen gets hedged. Smith has simply become really, really good at finding the open man, whether it’s Edey:
Or whether it’s one of the off-ball scorers for Purdue that rip it from three, like Fletcher Loyer (10.5 PPG, 45% 3PT).
Guys like Loyer and Mason Gillis (48% 3PT) cannot really create their own shots, but they benefit greatly from the amazing spacing the Smith/Edey combo produces. (Purdue is also great at getting buckets from offensive boards - not just the putbacks, but the ones Edey pushes back out.) Because of the level of attention you have to pay to the main two, you can lose track of those guys easily. It’s a hard task to deal with even in a one-off game.
The good news is that, for the most part, it really is just those two. Loyer and Gillis cannot self-create. Edey obviously isn’t going to drive in from 25 feet. That leaves Lance Jones (12 PPG), a very energetic guy who runs super hot and cold but can create for himself and for others reasonably well. Jones has been treated as the X-factor but it’s mostly because he has as many games with 4 or fewer points as he does 20 or more (three each). Jones is at his scariest in transition and is a very good shooter, but is quietly a great guy to funnel to the rim with a poor finishing rate.
Beyond that…not much. Trey Kaufman-Renn (6.6 PPG) starts alongside Edey but is way less effective in the post because he’s not the Iron Giant. Freshman Camden Heide is borderline invisible but is shooting 68% on twos and 46% on threes, albeit on very low volume for both. Caleb Furst is Edey’s backup but has played 4 MPG over the last five. Myles Colvin is getting more run at the 2/3 and is shooting 44% on threes but will not go inside the perimeter unless he’s required to.
Technically, at the time of writing, this is not the best offense Tennessee has played this year. Illinois is #2 to Purdue’s #3. (At the exact time I’m writing this, 6:24 PM ET, Illinois has 5 points in 6:30 of basketball.) But spiritually, this or maybe Alabama is the toughest ask for Tennessee this entire season. It’s a huge boon that they got to see it once already, but that was 4+ months ago in an arena neither team had played or will ever play a game in again. This is merely the biggest monkey-off-the-back game of the entire Tournament for anyone. Strap in.
CHART! Is once again from MGoBlog’s Seth Fisher. Mega-Edey also from Seth.
Purdue’s defense
Since February 15 (11 games):
Nothing shocking that you won’t remember from the first meeting. At the time of Maui this was looking like a top-5 or top-10 unit to go with their frightening offense. Time has revealed it to merely be pretty good, with a few holes here and there but nothing glaringly obvious. Much like Creighton, Purdue is going to be a very droppy drop coverage team and is disinterested in forcing turnovers. This is another “keep everything in front of you” defense, the second straight one Tennessee’s played.
That’s got good and bad to it. The bet on forcing a billion midrange twos (and it’s only gotten worse over the last month) in theory is a really good one. A lot of teams Purdue plays simply won’t hit the midrange twos enough to make them worthwhile, and few teams have wings that can truly challenge Edey with any serious hope at the rim. It was pretty easy to watch Purdue this year because they (and UConn) were the main character all year long, and pretty much everyone was forced to take a ton of jumpers and very few rim attempts. A lot of it was just this on a loop.
The only guy anything like Knecht in the Big Ten is Terrence Shannon if you squint, and even the controlled chaos of Shannon resulted in him going 1-4 at the rim in a 77-71 loss. They don’t give up straight-line drives to the rim, Edey is obviously very good as a post defender/rim protector, and the Purdue perimeter pieces are excellent at running shooters off the line, not letting you get off many catch-and-shoot looks. Trying to just go at Edey in the post to get him into foul trouble doesn’t work much, either. I watched Wisconsin try this in February and it was like banging one’s head against a brick wall.
But. BUT. Compared to the offense, making the case for this side of the ball having imperfections is a breeze. In the first game, Tennessee made plenty of hay with their off-ball screening actions and screens in general. The ball-screen areas where Purdue can be reasonably harmed are obvious: if you can hit midrange jumpers at a 45% clip or better, you are indeed in business. The off-ball screens and hand-offs require more notes. Majewski has the theory that Matt Painter isn’t 100% sure how to best use Edey against off-ball actions, which can create really bad 2-on-1s for Purdue’s defense. They’ve been poor at defending these all year, ranking in the 16th-percentile.
On off-ball screens where the center (Aidoo/Awaka) is involved, Edey almost plays zone while everyone else plays man, staying within 8-10 feet of the rim at all times. The reason he doesn’t come out further is obvious: they’d give up all the straight-line drives to the rim they want to prevent. That can work, but it’s beatable with the right actions. Another one Purdue has guarded poorly for similar reasons are dribble hand-offs, which were a huge bugaboo for the Boilermakers in their losses and lesser performances this year. All of Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Northwestern (plus Tennessee) scored serious damage on Purdue by attacking the Edey drop with actions like this one.
You don’t have to be defeatist with the rim, obviously, but the most proven way to beat Purdue this year is to turn the game into 2-on-1, over and over and over. If Edey hedges or steps out of the paint, that opens up more drives to the basket. If he doesn’t, you gotta hit jumpers. The good news: you did literally play this exact same thing last night. The bad news: they didn’t have Edey. The good news again: this isn’t significantly better than Creighton on the whole and you dropped 82 on that one.
How Tennessee matches up
For the Maui preview I said that Tennessee would have to hit jumpers and really hit the off-ball and on-ball screens as well as they could, more or less eschewing battling with Edey on the post. Tennessee ran a lot of screens and even had Jonas Aidoo take a few jumpers, but the Honolulu rims were very much not the Maui rims. They were hard as bricks. That resulted in one of the least enjoyable college basketball games of the entire season; this should be a lot better.
It’s weird to be writing a whole new preview here because I could just copy and paste the plan of attack for Creighton, but some tweaks are necessary. Tennessee clearly got the message about how you attack drop coverage, because they set a season record for ball screen usage (25 possessions, per Synergy) before Creighton panic-switched to multiple junk defenses for the final ten minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tennessee made Dalton Knecht the main ball-handler in these sets, where he really began to shred the Creighton drop.
That has to be the plan of attack a second time. Knecht is a unique matchup for Purdue in that they have no obvious ball-stopper for him. Mason Gillis will get the matchup as the best size match, and Gillis (plus teammates) did a good job on Knecht the first time around, but November Knecht versus now is like two different worlds. Tennessee’s also got to run Knecht off of the off-ball screens they love so much, of course.
The key guy here, beyond Knecht and Zakai Zeigler, is whatever center shows up for a full 40 or close to it. Is it Jonas Aidoo? If so, better hit a couple jumpers to draw Edey out of the paint even a little bit. Is it Tobe Awaka? If so, better draw a foul or two on Edey before you commit five of your own.
Whatever they can do, it’s going to have to revolve around hitting jumpers early at a rate that makes Painter and Edey both uncomfortable. The more you can get Edey to vacate the paint (or if you can get him in foul trouble), the better your odds are of winning this game. Given the immense spacing Purdue is forced to allow defensively by way of the Edey drop, this game can swing Tennessee’s way rapidly if they get hot. It can also swing negatively if they go cold. We won’t know until we know.
Defensively…pray? Purdue has shot 43% from three in their last ten games, which isn’t a sustainable hit rate. Maybe this is the day they only shoot 31%! You never know. The fact Tennessee guards the perimeter better than almost anyone else in the sport is encouraging, and I don’t think Purdue has played anything like it outside of Michigan State. The Spartans went 0-2 versus Purdue this year but did hold Purdue to 1.03 PPP in their second outing, mostly because they sucked it up and ate the Edey points while harassing Braden Smith into five turnovers and a 2-7 day from the field.
Arguably, that may be your best shot. On the whole this year, Purdue sits at 1.23 points per shot from three. Edey is at 1.25 points per shot from two. The rest of the roster combined is at 0.98 points per shot inside the perimeter. Single coverage with some swipes from guards and wings is probably the least-bad option here. Run the shooters off the three-point line, funnel them to the midrange, and deal with the consequences.
As such, Tennessee should probably lean more to drop coverage here. You have to play the percentages; I would rather not deal with Braden Smith’s terrific passing out of hard-hedges and be in a 3-on-4 defensive situation. Sticking with drop allows you to keep a body on Edey and forces a lot of midrange twos. Running shooters off the line was what Tennessee went with the first time around and it led to Purdue’s worst offensive game of the entire season. Run it back. Make them change, not you.
Expected starters + rotations
Purdue:
Same starting five the entire season. Gillis is the sixth man. Colvin and Heide are co-seventh men. Edey and TKR play together about ~11 minutes a night.
Tennessee:
Indications are Santiago Vescovi will return from the flu here. If so, no changes.
Key matchups
Zach Edey vs. Jonas Aidoo and Tobe Awaka. Awakadoo or Aiwaka or Tonas or whatever you wanna go with here have ten fouls to use between them. They need to use them wisely. If they’re above 4 combined at halftime, this is probably a lost cause.
Braden Smith vs. Zakai Zeigler. Zeigler was still getting his legs under him in November but even then he/Mashack made life hell on Braden Smith, who scored six points, had three turnovers, and was the worst guard in the game. A repeat performance here combined with Zeigler’s offensive progression since would be gigantic.
Lance Jones vs. Santiago Vescovi. Gillis and Loyer can/will hit shots, but they can’t self-create. Jones can and is weirdly annoying to be defended by, as you’ll see. If this is Mashack instead, you’ll be seeing a double technical assessed to each player by 0:00. They’re made for each other.
Three things to watch for
Three-point variance. This is the story of the Tournament thus far, as teams with a superior 3PT% are 50-12. Purdue is 27-1 when hitting 6 or more threes in a game. Run them off the line. Period.
BONUS: Three-point variance again? In the month of March, Purdue is hitting 44.4% of their threes. Opponents: 27.8%. Is that sustainable? I feel like it’s not, but March is March and weird stuff happens. Maybe this is the day it all comes home to roost.
If a year older really makes you a year wiser. Purdue has played 36 games this year. In 28 of them, they turned it over on fewer than 20% of their possessions. They went 28-0. In eight, they turned it over on more than 20%. They went 4-4. When Smith/Loyer/Jones have been really, truly hassled, it’s stunted Purdue’s offense immensely. That matters more to me than Edey does in a vacuum.
Foul count buildup. The targets here are sub-20 (for Tennessee) and sub-14 (for Purdue). If they go below those this should be a game all the way to the end. If it’s whistle-heavy it’s obviously not great for Tennessee.
Three predictions
Tennessee wins the turnover battle by 6 or more;
Dalton Knecht and Zach Edey combine for 52+ points;
They didn’t come this far just to come this far, and neither did I. Tennessee 74, Purdue 72.