Basketball Recruiting Update

PURDUE BASKETBALL RECRUITING

Note: Written on Sept. 11, 2025–before the weekend)

Two official visitors this weekend for Purdue, as top-five-ranked forward Cam Williams make his official visit along with the long-committed Luke Ertel, who’ll try to help Purdue with Williams, who he knows from the adidas circuit, same as he has with Quinn Costello.

Needless to say, Williams is going to be tough to get but he’s making this visit for a reason. Purdue has long really resonated with him and given its Day 1 need at forward in 2026, the one-year plan one would expect him to be on could be accommodated easily.

No idea how much money is a deciding factor for Williams, but needless to say, he’s going to have really lucrative opportunities all over the place. Duke and Arizona are going to come heavy, we’d figure.

We will say this based off the little we’ve been around Williams: As you’ll see in the interview above, he is a smart young man and a great effort guy beyond his raw talent. There is more of a natural fit there with Purdue than this being a great prospect you’d have to bend over backwards to make fit. Might be the reason he’s been so interested from the jump.

Have to consider this a long shot, obviously, but a non-zero chance at least.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=o_1OWh1fF8I%3Ffeature%3Doembed

This might be it for a while for official visits, as pretty much every existing 2026 target has visited and Arafan Diane chopped Purdue. Even if he’d made an official, there was no way Purdue was getting him.

Maybe some 2027s come in this fall, but Purdue would probably rather save OV opportunities for actual games, as it did with this class. Interested to see what they do with Isaiah Hill in that sense; he’s supposed to make an unofficial to Kentucky here soon. Purdue will want to stay front and center on that one.

• Last week we told you about LaLumiere’s Rivers Knight being a real possibility to become a Purdue target and now view that as an even stronger possibility than a week ago. Matt Painter will be up at LaLu late next week to see Jacob Webber and Knight. Things could get serious thereafter.

Reminder: Knight’s summer was a wash due to injury and conditioning issues that came from them, so this might have transformed into a recruitment where a known, highly recruited player is suddenly an under-the-radar type. By the time Painter goes up to LaPorte, hell have had Williams and Costello on officials and should have a pretty decent lay of the land with forwards.

A reminder too that Painter isn’t going to be averse to regularly recruiting players with redshirting in mind or to overload positions to be ready for anything, to have players moving up the pipeline each off-season without them necessarily being new. You have to find the right guys when you do that, but Painter’s been excellent at doing just that.

• After visiting Purdue Sinan Huan is now headed to Illinois, then Northwestern, taking advantage of family members having been brought in from overseas. Whether Purdue, as the first visit, foot the bill for that to everyone else’s benefit, we have no idea, but we doubt it. But a quick decision was really never in the offing with him in part for that reason: Family are out here for recruiting; when recruiting ends, they go back, presumably.

If this comes down to just these three schools, Purdue is going to have a great chance. Its history with centers, and the development thereof, is what is.

There’s some adjacence (yeah, that’s right) to Brandon Bass‘ recruitment. Purdue couldn’t take Bass, but did a good enough job with him and his coaches that he wanted to commit. (BN)