Around this time last season, the Purdue basketball team was sitting at home watching March Madness as they were upset by the FDU Knights in the round of 64, even though they were the No. 1 seed in the region. Fast forward to the present time and the Boilermakers have advanced to the national championship game as stars Zach Edey, Mason Gillis, and head coach Matt Painter talk about how their disappointing finish in the pass lit a fire under them.
While some teams like to say they put bad losses behind them and focus on the task at hand, it was different for the Purdue basketball team. Boilermakers senior forward in Gillis spoke after the game about that and admitted that he doesn't believe “it has ever been put behind us” according to Myron Medcalf of ESPN.
“I don't think it has ever been put behind us,” Gillis said. “We've always had open conversations about it. We've talked about how we felt losing [last year]. We talked about how we were going to grow from it. And then we acted on it. We didn't just talk. Obviously, last year we lost in the first game. Now, we're in the national championship.”
Gillis talks how Boilermakers loss last year has “fueled” them
The Purdue basketball team beat NC State Saturday night, 63-50, as Gillis would finish the game with eight points and four rebounds. While he questions the chance if they would be in this situation in the present if the tides were changed last season, he expressed how the team kept seeing the negative coverage of the Boilermakers and how it “fueled us.”
“I don't want to say we wouldn't be in this situation if we hadn't lost to [Fairleigh Dickinson],” Gillis said. “But it has definitely fueled us. Sitting in that loss, seeing it on social media 24/7, seeing it on TV, even throughout this year, everybody wants to say, ‘Yeah they've done this, but they lost to FDU last year,' ‘Yeah, they did this, but they lost to FDU last year.' So we're just proving everybody wrong, proving ourselves right, having each other's back. And we'll get the job done.”
Zach Edey on the reason he came back to play
One of the main reasons why the team has had this major success has been because of Zach Edey, who just recently won his second consecutive national player of the year as he averaged 24.9 points, 12.2 rebounds, and 2.2 blocks per game. The senior 7-foot, 4-inch center is among all the talk of college basketball and there has been endless conversations about his possible NBA future as he will be eligible for the upcoming draft.
Coming off of an exceptional performance in the Elite Eight against Tennessee where he scored 40 points and collected 16 rebounds, he was solid in the Final Four. He still led the team with 20 points and 12 rebounds as he said after the game that the Purdue basketball team has been talking about their redemption all season and was the reason he came back to college basketball.
‘”[It's] what we've been talking about all year,” Edey said per ESPN. “The reason I came back is [to play in] games like this. The reason I'm playing college basketball for four years — to finally get this game, it's big-time. We've obviously got to keep going and keep playing.”
Matt Painter talks how Purdue basketball battled back in Final Four
However, it wasn't really a perfect game played by the Boilermakers as any coach or player would tell you on the team as they committed 16 turnovers in total and shot the ball poorly to start the game. Purdue basketball head coach Matt Painter said that his team was “able to battle back” and take control of the game in the second half.
“Just getting a win without any of the particulars is worth it, right? To be able to advance,” Painter said. “I always talk about that, trying to win a Big Ten championship. Everybody wants to talk about winning it. I said, ‘Man, you got to get yourself in position before you can win one.' It's like winning a national championship. You can talk all you want, but if you're not going to play on Monday, you don't have a chance.
“Obviously, we put ourselves in a position to win one. You've got to give our guys credit. They've been able to battle back. They've also been able to handle a lot of adversity.”
For Painter, he has been head coach of the program since 2005 and has now brought the Purdue basketball team back to the national championship game, their first since 1969. He also now has an opportunity to bring the Boilermakers their first title ever.
“We didn't even play that good” per Boilermakers sophomore
The job is far from over, but what could be scary is that they didn't play their best basketball as sophomore Fletcher Loyer said. Finishing the game with 11 points, he mentioned that even though the Boilermakers have shut up a lot of the doubters, “we have a lot more to prove.”
“We're not done,” Loyer said. “We didn't even play that good. I think we have a lot more to prove. We have a good day of rest. We'll take advantage of it and be ready to go Monday.”
The Purdue basketball team has one more game and it's arguably the biggest game of the program's history as they will try to capture their first national title. However, the UConn Huskies are in the way as themselves are trying to repeat and take down the Boilermakers as the game will be Monday night at 9:20 p.m. (EST), being broadcasted on TBS.
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