Upon Further Review: Marquette

After each Purdue basketball game this season, GoldandBlack.com will take a detailed look back at the contest to highlight some of its finer points.

Today, the Boilermakers’ 79-59 win Saturday over Marquette.

PDF: Purdue-Marquette stats

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PURDUE OFFENSE VS. MARQUETTE DEFENSE

Historically, Marquette is a really hard team to play against. Not sure that’s as much the case this season, but once Purdue settled into the game it had a lot of answers, as its 54-percent shooting illustrates.

With Marquette, it’s generally about handling perimeter pressure and trapping.

These are failures, but illustrative of concept.

Braden Smith gets the double team on the perimeter, gets it out of his hands and now Purdue has numbers, but Marquette’s low man reads Trey Kaufman-Renn looking for Daniel Jacobsen rolling to the rim and breaks it up.

Here, a similar deal. Smith gives it up, Gicarri Harris flips the play into the empty side of the floor and sets up this easy entry to TKR. More often than not, this is going to be a bucket for Purdue.

Point of all this is that when Smith is trapped, it’s about the next guy making the key pass or play. Neither of these plays above resulted in points, but they were the right plays.

Smith is really difficult to mix things up on, because he’s really good at reading and reacting and handling whatever comes his way.

Here, Smith just carries three defenders and hits CJ Cox for this three.

It’s the little stuff that really jumps out about Smith. Here has Marquette trying to match up in transition. This little veer left forces big guy Ben Gold to take Smith; once Gold commits, Smith doesn’t let him go.

Purdue again seemed intent to get Fletcher Loyer looks early. This is 100 percent playing off Marquette’s gravitational pull toward TKR.

Smart here, too: Once Purdue’s bigs started killing Marquette, Purdue hits it with this. The one guy Marquette can’t leave.

Marquette went zone. It didn’t really work.

It wasn’t just Smith who torched Marquette’s defensive activity on the perimeter. Both Omer Mayer and Cox made big-time long-roll passes for easy baskets.

FINDING OSCAR CLUFF

Some of this intentional, some just kind of happened, but whatever the case, Oscar Cluff dominated Marquette.

Organic, Marcin Gortat’s lasting legacy in basketball.

This is absolutely purposeful by Purdue, which runs its handoff really high on the floor to stretch Marquette out and guarantee Cluff a wide berth and no help defenders anywhere in his area code.

When Marquette started bringing hard post doubles on Trey Kaufman-Renn, Cluff got a putback off it as well as this 5-man dive off the help.

Cluff did a nice job running the floor and beating Marquette to his preferred position. Loyer in particular seemed hyper-aware of looking for him. Here it’s Cox.

PURDUE DEFENSIVE FLASHES

There were some really excellent moments for Purdue from a team defense standpoint.

Tremendous possession here by Omer Mayer in particular, starting with this lane help against the initial pick-and-roll, then his recovery and baseline help. Great job by Gicarri Harris, too.

Little stuff …

Loyer directing traffic here to get Cluff switched back off the inbounder.

Tremendous possession here from Daniel Jacobsen and chemistry with Braden Smith, excellent optics after the two didn’t always seem on the same page the past few games.

Smith is really dialed in on D right now. Marquette knows how aggressive he is in passing lanes right now as is trying to get him here.

Purdue is doing a good job being ready for people to go after those inbound switches.

Here, Cluff just sees it coming.