Braden Smith and Purdue avoid disaster, advance to the Big Ten semifinals
MINNEAPOLIS — Around 2 p.m. local time Friday, with his right leg stretched out and swathed in ice, Braden Smith was asked yet again about the moment that had aged Purdue men’s basketball fans to a disturbing degree. Because the inquiring mind belonged to teammate Chase Martin and not a media member milling about the locker room, this version was a little more blunt and a little less sanitized.
He drove to the rim. Michigan State’s Tyson Walker swiped down hard. Walker missed the ball and hit Smith’s leg. The contact hyperextended his knee. In conclusion?
“That s— hurt,” Smith declared.
Were you in need of oxygen at the time, the Target Center was the place to be, as anyone with a passing interest in the Boilermakers ceased breathing for a while. All is well after a 67-62 win in the Big Ten tournament quarterfinals. But not before scare piled upon scare, not before an All-Big Ten bellwether hopped off the floor and crumpled to the ground, not before these poor souls in black and gold wondered what they’d done to deserve this.
It might be, in some ways, helpful. Even auspicious. No one but Zach Edey shot well. The physicality was such that officials actually checked the floor for blood splatters at halftime. The 6-foot roll of barbed wire who plays point guard was in foul trouble in the first half and possibly seriously injured in the second. And Purdue found a way to avoid an upset in March. Its fans might prefer that this happens without the need for smelling salts or powerful antacids, yes. But a way was found nevertheless.
If the dread sight of Smith needing help to leave the floor didn’t shake Purdue, then maybe nothing truly will.
“We all have a bad taste of what happened last year, and the media keeps reminding us,” forward Mason Gillis said in the locker room afterward. “That’s constant motivation.”
No one anywhere is more valuable than Edey. A 7-foot-4 two-time Big Ten Player of the Year is a fairly large thumb on that scale. But Smith’s indispensability to this group and its cause is not up for debate, either. No one can make a realistic case for Purdue achieving NCAA Tournament deliverance without the guard whose player efficiency rating (20.1) and Win Shares total (4.8) ranked second among Boilermakers going into the postseason, who assists on 36.5 percent of his team’s buckets when he’s on the floor, whose overall year-to-year growth is a massive factor in Purdue having its highest adjusted efficiency margin (+29.58) of the KenPom era.