Butterfly Effect: Bottoming Out in 2014

“The Butterfly Effect” is a limited-run series GoldandBlack.com is rolling out this summer highlighting events that occurred or decisions that were made that rippled out and helped Purdue reach its current level, highlighted by the last season’s Final Four and leading into this much-anticipated coming season.

An example of the Butterfly Effect in this context: Roy Williams leaving Kansas for North Carolina, thus pulling Bill Self from Illinois to Kansas, leading to Bruce Weber getting the Illinois job, and Matt Painter being promoted at Southern Illinois, all just as Purdue’s post-Gene Keady plans had to be made.

PART 4: LAST PLACE IN THE BIG TEN

It was Senior Day in Mackey Arena on March 9, 2014, but the only cause for celebration, really, was that a woebegone season was almost over. The Wildcats won 74-65, clinching for the home team a last-place Big Ten finish. Afterward, when asked what happened at the end of a season gone horribly awry, Matt Painter assumed the responsibility, using his regularly referenced “school district” analogy.

The players who’d concluded that season a few days later by losing, surprisingly narrowly, to Ohio State in the Big Ten Tournament to finish having lost 12 of 14, it was Painter that recruited those players, as was his message afterward.

It was a terrible season, one that concluded with a 15-17 record, 5-13 in the Big Ten. The Boilermakers’ second straight losing season put Painter on the hot seat, he believed. “They usually don’t give you a third year,” he’d say later. Whether that was reality or not after Painter had revived the program prior to the downturn, who knows, but the optics also weren’t great after Purdue had upped its investment in the program after nearly losing its alumnus coach to Missouri.

As things turned out, though, this was a seminal moment for Purdue and Painter.

Those back-to-back losing seasons taught Painter lessons or at least highlighted things he already knew but needed to apply to his program-building approach. The ripple effects of those lessons have all driven Purdue’s ascent to elite status in college basketball.

These are all really important, and all can be traced back to those 2012-2014 teams’ failures, which Painter would call his failures.

Those teams couldn’t shoot, with a particularly unskilled group that wound up shooting sub-33 percent from three that last-place season. There were talented players on that team, some of them young, but also a crippling penchant for selfish, tunnel-vision basketball and a glaring shortage of skill.

Thereafter, Painter laid a mandate to recruit a pre-eminent shooter in every class that followed and went all-in on dribble-pass-and-shoot players whereas before athleticism might have caught his eye first. When Purdue found Dakota Mathias and Vince Edwards early in their high school careers, coaches were all over them, and wound up landing both, two of the most important recruits of the Painter Era given how they turned Purdue for a skill standpoint. Today, Purdue has been one of the finest and most consistent offensive teams in college basketball, and it’s because of the lessons of that 2013-2014 offense that shot poorly, turned the ball over nearly 400 times in just 32 games and just exhibited no poise or savvy in key moments.

The basketball piece of it, though, was half the story.

Those teams were hard to coach, difficult to communicate with and not naturally geared toward winning and compatibility with coaches and teammates. When Painter found players lying about stupid things like not eating breakfast — malfeasance for malfeasance’s sake — he had enough. He’d already been through similar drama with his first recruiting class, but this brought the “Purdue fit” focus to 20/20-level clarity. It was around that team Painter began contemplating personality profiling and the rest is sort of history.

Another element that may not be obvious to the casual observer: Those bad Purdue teams were born from the insanity of the Tom Crean-fueled Early Offer Era in the state of Indiana, when the paradigm was the earlier the offer, the better, and if you didn’t offer immediately, you weren’t serious. (Credit to grassroots coaches, high school coaches and other voices around players at that time for maturing since them.)

But then, Purdue was offering players as freshmen or sophomores without much relationship-building runway or character vetting, and for a time everyone seemed to be committing early, so Purdue was looking at its home state first, making tons of early offers, then getting locked into players who took the offer right now. Some turned out fine; others didn’t.

Since, Purdue has expanded its range looking for a very specific type of player and personality and in many cases been very methodical issuing offers. In-state players will always get the first look, but far from the only look.

But the emphasis on personality, shooting, passing and IQ grew around the model A.J. Hammons kind of started with 7-footers at Purdue and things took off then and there.

Purdue has that unwatchable last-place team to thank as it turned out. It’s a clear example of what Aerosmith said long ago, “You’ve got to lose to know how to win.”