WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Matt Painter sits at the head of the conference room table, the organized chaos of the Purdue brain trust splayed all around him. Analytical printouts mix with ripped pieces of paper where the Boilermakers’ head basketball coach since 2005 has feverishly jotted down some hoop thought that crept into his mind. It is less than an hour before practice begins, and the collection of notes along with ideas his staff peppers him with eventually coalesce into the day’s schedule. Painter writes it all down on a white, lined legal pad.
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Finally, as styrofoam-shielded lunch arrives, Painter turns to the last item on the to-do list. With an 11-day, four-game European tour ahead, he has reserved the last 20 minutes of practice for scrimmaging. Painter will officiate, which leaves his assistants to choose sides. “Paul,” he says to Paul Lusk, “you go first. Who do you want?” Lusk, who’s on his second stint at Purdue, leans back in his chair, shrugs and smirks. “Zach Edey.” Once Lusk and Brandon Brantley divvy up the roster, it’s time to pick teams for the second game. This time Terry Johnson gets dibs. “Uhhh,” Johnson says, pausing as if he’s contemplating the choices, “I’ll take Edey.”
Painter looks up from writing down the picks and smiles. “Aren’t they geniuses?”
Figuring out where to start with Purdue is, in fact, not difficult. The Boilermakers begin where they resided all of last year, deep in the low post with the most dominant force in college basketball. Edey collected so many trophies last season — national player of the year, consensus first-team All-American, Kareem Abdul Jabbar Award, Pete Newell Big Man Award, among others — he didn’t have anywhere to stash them. “I live in a room in a college house,” he says. “What am I supposed to do? There’s the couch, there’s the TV, and here’s my trophies? Like get a glass case with a light or something?” Instead a pile sits in a plastic bin inside the office of Chris Forman, a Purdue athletic department administrator. Eventually Edey’s mother, Julia, will collect them.
There could, of course, be more coming, now that Edey is back in West Lafayette for another run. This is where it gets interesting. The start is obvious; it’s the finish that will be curious. How Purdue finishes after a disastrous exit last year, but more, how Edey finishes his college career.
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Despite that bin of trophies, Edey, 21, remains dogged by what people – fans, opponents and, yes, NBA brass — believe he can’t do. It is the burden of being 7 feet 4 in a sport where height matters. People presume he is only tall, not talented; bigger than everyone else, not truly better than everyone else; a load but also a liability.
With a chance to become the first male athlete to sweep the national player of the year awards in back-to-back seasons since Ralph Sampson (1981-83), maybe Edey finally can be appreciated for who and what he is.
Julia Edey remembers the first time she took her son to a baseball practice. Understand there was no time in his life that Edey was not extraordinarily big – 11 pounds, 3 ounces at birth, projected off the growth chart as an infant, 6-10 by eighth grade, the EKG bump on the otherwise traditional flatline in team and class pictures. Julia eyed up the pitching machine meant to groove the ball in for nascent hitters and blanched. “My God,’’ she thought. “He’s going to hit the ball up the middle and kill somebody.’’
For much of Edey’s life, that’s been the refrain — that his height was his unfair advantage. Of course he could dominate in ice hockey. He was practically a Yeti on skates. Naturally he got a scholarship for basketball. Who wouldn’t take a kid who stands just 32 inches below the rim? And, well, yeah, he’s the player of the year. He either reaches over everybody else or he just pushes them around and fouls them.
Edey’s height casts a near literal shadow over everything else about him as an athlete, obscuring the fact that he has exceptionally good footwork and good hands; that while he naturally led all centers at the NBA combine in standing reach, height and wingspan, he also finished behind only fleet-of-foot Drew Timme (7 inches shorter and 65 pounds shy of Edey) among centers in the lane agility test. As a sophomore, he shot an abysmal 64 percent from the free-throw line, making hack-a-Zach a good defensive ploy. Last season, he sank 73 percent, giving opponents pause.
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Edey did not play basketball until the 10th grade — a mere five years ago. When he came to Purdue, he was the 436th-ranked player in the country, per 247Sports. Last season he averaged 22.3 points and 12.9 rebounds per game, easily the most efficient offensive player in Ken Pomeroy’s rankings. Opponents did not get smaller; he got better. And yet. “I feel like my story is really one of success,’’ he says. “I came in, played basketball for a year, moved to the U.S. (from Canada), came to Purdue and worked my ass off. Played two years behind Trevion (Williams), never complained. Never pouted. This year, I finally had my chance to shine. I’m not sure why people can’t see that.”
It is one thing when the people espousing cynicism are simply trolls on social media; it is another altogether when it is the folks who decide your livelihood. That the NBA has pivoted away from the traditional big man is not news. The evolution from 2007 first pick and center, Greg Oden, to 2023 first pick and center, Victor Wembayama, might serve as the best illustration as to what the pros are looking for now versus what turned their heads back when. Edey — like a host of players before and with him, including last year’s player of the year, Oscar Tshiebwe – once would have been gone after one year.
Now, through no fault of their own, they don’t fit. Edey likely would have been drafted … somewhere in the second round. He wrestled with the decision, waiting until the deadline to make his announcement. He wasn’t trying to be a diva. That day he’d had a workout with the Milwaukee Bucks, and while no team would promise exactly what he wanted — a two-way contract commitment that would offer him actual game time — they wouldn’t exactly say they wouldn’t come through, either. Up until the final day, teams were sniffing around.
His head spun from all of it, and if Edey learned anything from the whole process, it’s how the sausage of the NBA business is made. It never occurred to him that nothing happens in a vacuum, that promising Edey a second-round spot might negate a trade opportunity, for example.
But understanding that tornado and being caught in the middle of it are two different things. His mother sensed Edey’s struggles, that his head and his heart were in a bit of turmoil. As Edey was riding back from the Bucks’ workout – alone save the driver for the car service – he hopped on a conference call with Julia and his agent, Mark Bartelstein. They went through the choices again. “I finally said, ‘I hear a lot of “should,” but what do you actually want?’” Julia asked.
Edey hung up and kicked it around some more. Name, image and license (NIL) compensation rendered the financial tussle moot. As a foreign athlete, the limitations complicate things; Edey can’t so much as send a social media post related to his NIL partnerships while he’s on American soil. A pitch to the state department to allow Edey to work under the exception for nonimmigrants with extraordinary abilities or achievements — he is one of one as the player of the year, the school argued — has so far stalled.
But Purdue’s collective, the Boilermaker Alliance, worked an end-around comparable to the deal he would have made via that two-year contract (the minimum is $560,000). “If this was before NIL, I probably would have left,” he says. “That’s fair to say. But now I’m allowed to be rewarded for the season I had last year, for the season my team had last year. This is how NIL was meant to be used, I think. Not the way some schools are using it.”
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Given Edey’s circumstances and financial security, he considered his mother’s advice. “I kept thinking, I don’t want to look back on this and say, ‘Damn. I wish I had gone back,”’ Edey says. “I have the rest of my life to work. The NBA is a business. Purdue is a blessing.”
That night, as the deadline neared, Edey first texted his teammates before posting the “run it back” gif on social media. By the time he returned to West Lafayette, the Purdue campus had nearly emptied with summer break. Upon entering his house and dropping his stuff, Edey hit up teammate Fletcher Loyer and logged onto his PlayStation.
Just like that, he was a college kid again.
There is a whole lot of “prove it” potential for Edey this season. Prove that he belongs in the NBA, prove that Purdue’s disastrous NCAA Tournament flop was not, as it’s been proffered, a referendum on the Boilermakers’ systemic program flaws. It all adds up to the sort of internal bulletin board material that could make for an easy grab and go motivator. Edey considers it all, and shakes his head. “External motivation, I believe, that’s only temporary,’’ he says. “You can’t sustain that. You can’t work forever off of ‘I’ll prove them wrong.’ You have to be self-motivated.’’
He is stretched out in a chair inside Purdue’s practice facility, having completed his last summer workout with his teammates. While the Boilermakers head to Europe, he will spend the next three weeks with the Canadian national team, the only college player on the country’s FIBA World Cup roster. By the time he returns to campus in September, official practice will be just around the corner.
Edey is not much for firebrand. He gets mad but he does not burn hot naturally, which is why setting out to silence the detractors doesn’t really suit him. He tends to internalize rather than vocalize. After the Boilermakers lost to Fairleigh Dickinson, the ignominy of being the second 1-seed to lose to a 16 exacerbated by the Knights ranking as the shortest team in D1, Edey says he didn’t speak for an entire day. He does not mean conversationally. He means words did not cross his lips.
He feels that loss, along with the added burden as the reigning player of the year. Painter has told all of his players that avoiding it, asking not to talk about it, is foolish. It happened and the only way to deal with disappointment is to confront it. Julia naturally worries. “People in this world like to see you come up,’’ she says, “and then they really like to see you come down.’’
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But they don’t give mulligans in the NCAA Tournament, and there’s no magic wand to turn him into what the NBA wants. He is who he is, and his only choice is to convince people that he’s worth it. It won’t be easy.
Despite the league’s affinity to draft on upside and potential, there seems to be a hesitancy to afford Edey the same grace — even though he’s in the infancy of his basketball career. “He’ll have another elite year,’’ one scout says. “Won’t change who he is.’’ Or, like always, what he’s not. Because that’s where this whole thing keeps returning, to the same tropes that dogged him throughout his childhood. Because he was bigger, he could not also be better.
This is not to say that Edey does not have basketball weaknesses. Concerns about his ability to guard in the pick-and-roll are borne out in the statistics. Last season when Edey was involved in pick-and-roll coverage, opponents averaged 1.091 points per possession, per Synergy — which was in the bottom quarter nationally.
But the notion that he’s done, that he’s maxed out his potential five years into his career, seems ludicrous. Three years ago, 400-plus prospects ranked above him. This year, he’s the player of the year. And neither he nor his coach thinks he’s even come close to his ceiling. Edey is getting more comfortable shooting while he faces the basket, and continues to refine his free throw touch. He’s grown into an effective passer, exposing teams that double him with open looks for the Boiler shooters. The knee-jerk opinion is that Edey needs to shoot more 3-pointers. He can sink them, and does routinely during practice. But Painter questions the sanity of parking a 7-4 guy on the wing.
The coach likens it to buying a house. “Everyone wants their five or six comps, right? Like the same square footage, same amount of lawn space,’’ he says. “Well, Zach doesn’t have a comp right now. So he has to break down a pretty big wall and show them he’s good enough. And the only way he can do that is to play. Just play.’’
Edey suits up for Lusk’s Team Black in the first game. Finishes the 10-minute scrimmage with two points, five rebounds and an assist. He dresses again in Black for Johnson in Game 2. Finishes with four points, six boards and an assist.
Black wins game one, 21-12.
Black takes game two, 20-13.
While the players who lost line up for sprints, Edey meanders on the sideline.
No one mentions what Edey didn’t do or can’t do. They’re too busy appreciating what he can do.
He can win.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photo: Dylan Buell)