Zach Edey is the biggest reason the Purdue basketball team will get a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. The 7-foot-4 center leads the nation in scoring with 24.3 points per game and is about to win back-to-back National Player of the Year Awards. So why does the big Boilermaker get so much criticism ahead of March Madness? His coach Matt Painter has no idea.
“I've never seen somebody so good get so much s**t for no reason,” Painter said after Purdue’s 76-75 overtime loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten Tournament semifinal, per USA Today. “It blows my mind.”
As a huge, traditional, back-to-the-basket center, Edey would have found a decade-long home in the NBA if he’d played in the 1980s or 90s. However, in the modern, three-point-happy game of basketball, a 7-foot-4 big man is no longer appreciated.
That said, size is still size on a basketball court, and as Edey has proven for years in Indiana now, it is still incredibly hard to stop a huge player with his skill.
While Edey isn’t headed for the lottery in the 2024 NBA Draft, he still has an NCAA Tournament run to go, but winning it all in March Madness won’t be easy for him, which could be the genesis of some of the Edey hate.
Big men don’t often win March Madness
One reason people don’t believe Zach Edey can lead Matt Painter and the Purdue basketball program to a national title in March Madness is that traditional big men don’t often do so.
The last time a traditional center led his team to the national championship was Jahlil Okafor of Duke in 2015. Before that, it was 2004 with UConn and Emeka Okafor (although Ben Gordon was the team’s regular season leading scorer), and before that, you have to go back to 1993 and North Carolina’s Eric Montross.
Outside of that, it was Patrick Ewing with Georgetown in 1984, and that’s about it in the last 40 years.
In the topsy-turvy March Madness tournament, you need guard play to get to the end. Big men are too reliant on other players getting them the ball and too susceptible to foul trouble caused by overzealous referees.
For these reasons, the haters may be too tough on Edey, but they also might not be wrong about his chances in March.
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