Honesty is the best policy for Matt Painter. The Purdue coach preaches it on the recruiting trail and practices it with his rotations. Nearly three years ago, he asked Trevion Williams, a reigning first-team, All-Big Ten selection, to embrace a bench role so that Purdue could start a blooming sophomore named Zach Edey.
Before he became a two-time National Player of the Year, Edey formed half of one of the best center platoons in recent memory.
Painter expressed pessimism that Edey, a 7-foot-4, 300-pound big man, could play alongside Williams, a 6-foot-10, 255-pound dancing bear, so he halved the 40 minutes almost perfectly. Edey and Williams played together for just four minutes and one second that 2021-22 season. It was a little awkward at times, but it worked. Purdue leaned on the second-best offense in the country to win 29 games, and its centers combined to average 26.4 points and 15.1 rebounds per game which, conveniently, sounds ridiculously similar to Edey’s video game-like stat lines from the last two years.
That center platoon made Purdue look a little different than most of its counterparts.
Three years later, that center platoon has erupted.
The explosion of player movement, fueled by the NIL market and an utterly absurd 67-man coaching carousel, has forced more staffs to build a roster from scratch. Roster-construction in 2024 has become sort of like building a house, and putting a center platoon in the blueprints has become a massive priority. Over half (40 of the 77) of the teams housed in the five richest, high-major conferences have some semblance of a center platoon in place.
Maybe it’s a bit like Moneyball. Finding a guy to replace Zach Edey’s 25 points and 12 rebounds in the portal wasn’t feasible, but, with how much Purdue feeds its bigs, Painter might be able to get 20 points and 10 rebounds from a combination of Trey Kaufman-Renn and 7-foot-3 freshman center Daniel…
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