Skip to main content
Purdue

Gold and Black Radio: Purdue basketball summer practice

by: Dub Jellison08/05/25dubjellison
Screenshot 2025-08-04 at 11.14.17 PM


Purdue basketball wrapped up summer practice this week, as GoldandBlack.com’s Brian Neubert and host Derek Schultz break it all down for you. 

Purdue basketball: Takeaways

(this is an excerpt from Brian Neubert’s Takeaways: Purdue basketball’s summer season winds down from Monday.

PURDUE IS SHARP, AS IT SHOULD BE

Experience matters. Experience together matters more.

And though there are some newcomers moving into key roles here, you are seeing a pretty smooth product on the floor here, a pretty cohesive unit. The ball moves crisply and decisively, as it should with a team that’s played so much together and with guards as good as Purdue’s. This team all summer has shot the ball very well, which at least in part reflects cohesiveness because players shoot better when they know what to do, where to be and where the ball is coming from and how it’s going to get there.

On-boarding Mayer and Cluff, freshman Antione West and eventually new forward Liam Murphy is important, but the returning core of the roster should be experienced and bonded well enough to be pretty low-maintenance. Great teams coach themselves to a certain extent and Purdue seems to have that capability.

Purdue is going to keep pushing veterans to talk more, but Fletcher Loyer really stands out in that area and it’s a very positive thing when Braden Smith wanders over to the sideline between reps to talk Mayer through whatever was just run.

BIG MEN TRANSFORM PURDUE

The Boilermakers go from prohibitively small last season to again being filthy rich at center, where Cluff arrives and towering sophomore Daniel Jacobsen returns from injury.

Purdue now has credible rim protection and, more importantly, real defensive rebounding punch, transformative elements for a team that was good last season but flawed. Yesterday’s flaws, though, might be today’s strengths.

But there are some things to iron out.

With All-American Trey Kaufman-Renn now likely to play forward primarily instead of center, Purdue will again have to manage spacing, but also find advantages in now being abundantly big. This being a ball-screen-oriented offense built for Braden Smith, keeping congestion to a minimum is going to matter.

Purdue spent more time Sunday working on flip-up-dunk scenarios than perhaps ever, leveraging Kaufman-Renn’s short-roll gravity to set him to throw lobs to 5 men diving to the basket.

Cluff and Jacobsen may get a lot of high-percentage opportunities at the rim, and this team is going to be exponentially more effective finishing on the interior than last year’s was.

Purdue basketball 2025-26 schedule:

You may also like