For Purdue basketball coach Matt Painter and his team, the margin for error is razor thin right now. Just outside the NCAA Tournament bubble, the Boilermakers need to, at the very least, reach the Big Ten Tournament title game to get back in the big dance mix. The season is not lost as of yet.
With the Big Ten Tournament final taking place after nearly all of the bracket has been filled out, the schedule works out to their advantage. Ditto for the location, as no Big Ten team is closer to Indianapolis than Purdue. Mackey Arena to Bankers Life Fieldhouse is 72.7 miles, an hour and 12 minute drive according to Google Maps.
Match-up wise, it’s debatable whether the Boilermakers are at an advantage of disadvantage this coming week.
“They definitely took it to us in our one meeting this year,” Painter said of the #7 seed Ohio State Buckeyes who they’ll meet in their first round game on Thursday night. The Boilers did indeed get hammered in that game, 68-52 at Value City Arena, on one of those nights where the Purdue offense was MIA.
As the conference tournament’s #10 seed, it would be a mild upset if Purdue gets past OSU, where the reward for doing so is a date with #2 seed and conference co-champ Michigan State.
It’s worth noting that Michigan State (7 in Net and KenPom) is Purdue’s signature win of this season, as they crushed the Spartans 71-42 in their only meeting.
MSU came into Mackey ranked #5 nationally at the time, but the home side absolutely crushed them.
Despite beating two of the league’s three tri-champions, and racking up two wins against Iowa (by a combined score of 45), who ended the week #18 in the polls, we still find Purdue having to run the table in order to get into the big dance.
Asked on the Big Ten Tournament coaches call today if the Boilermakers must win out in order to join in on all the madness this March Painter responded:
“It’s hard to really say, but I think if we would have won a game or two, won our last game, we would have been right there.”
He then lamented the quasi-play-in game at home against Rutgers on Saturday that got away.
“With losing our last game, with the amount of losses that we have, I’d say that we have to win four straight to go to the tournament- that has to be our mentality.”
“You can’t get to that point, win a couple games and then say hey this is enough because there’s other factors that go into it, and think ‘hey, we’re in, so don’t worry about it, when you’re on the bubble- you can’t think that way, you have to think about the game you’re playing and try to win that.”
Matt Painter then flashed back to his days at mid-major programs.
“No different than being at Southern Illinois or Eastern Illinois, no matter what kind of season you had, a majority of the time, even though we had an at large bid at Southern Illinois, but you were like ‘hey we got to win these three games in the tournament to go to the NCAA, so that’s what we’re thinking, but we got to beat Ohio State first and that’s going to be tough.”
With a NET of 33, a KenPom of 24 and resume wins galore, Purdue still has a fighting chance to go dancing, despite the slightly unsightly record of 16-15 overall, 9-11 in the league.
In addition to the aforementioned wins, they’ve also beaten Virginia, VCU and Minnesota.
What will happen this week/weekend? Good luck trying to figure that out- no one has been able to consistently predict Purdue this season.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly appears on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
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