Gold and Black Radio: Purdue looks to gather momentum at Big Ten Tournament

In our March 10, 2026 edition, host Derek Schultz and GoldandBlack.com’s Purdue men’s basketball expert break down what is next for Purdue as it hopes to get its ship righted in the Big Ten Tournament this weekend.

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PURDUE AND DEFENSE (an excerpt from Brian Neubert’s Three Thoughts column)

This Big Ten season, Purdue finished fourth in the league in scoring, at 79.8 points per game. It was 2-7 in games played against anyone else in the top eight.

It was defense, folks. I don’t think I need to tell anyone that. When Purdue was good defensively, you could see the connectivity and energy and more than not, a robust margin of victory. When it wasn’t, defeat.

Purdue is not old “Defense Lives Here” Purdue. I don’t mean just now. I mean, at all.

Good offense beats good defense and that’s the approach Purdue and many, many others have adhered to in their program-building.

This is kind of the calculation people have to make in program-building nowadays: If it’s really hard to have both, do you want to be an offensive program or do you want to be a defensive program? Painter will always be a defensive coach at heart, but the calculation he made years back about loading up on offensive skill has obviously paid off in a big way, though it has not come without the challenge of continuing to be effective on defense.

If you want shooters and passers, they are not always the fleetest of foot. The ones who are won’t be in college long. Size is a Purdue priority. Size is a double-edged defensive blade at every level of the game. This team is either too big at certain positions, too small at certain positions, too slow almost all over and a lousy close-out team for all-of-the-above reasons. It is not consistently disciplined and energized, for whatever reason, and that’s the unacceptable part for all involved.

You might ask: Hey, Michigan is really big too. Why can they defend? Well, the brilliance of Michigan’s construction is that when they were choosing their roster before last year’s portal opened, they identified and went out and got two incredibly versatile and physically overwhelming defensive forwards in Yaxel Lendeborg and Morez Johnson. As talented, physically mature and big as Michigan is, it’s that defensive combination that makes that team really special, if you ask me.

What Purdue does defensively is not unique in concept. It is designed to dull expected vulnerabilities, to cover deficiencies, to contain. When Brad Underwood came to Illinois, he brought with him an all-out, heavy-pressure, full-denial system that it took him like a year to figure out wouldn’t work in the Big Ten, certainly not with Kofi Cockburn. He moved to a scheme more in line with what Purdue does and guess what the Illini’s vulnerability is: Defense, no matter how much their rebounding and capacity to outscore people overcomes it.

The days of high-pressure defense in the Big Ten are gone. If you rank teams in the Big Ten by defensive turnover percentage, it’s basically the standings upside-down.

The priority is keeping the ball in front, limiting paint touches and avoiding breakdowns.

This is not a one-on-one sport, college basketball. It’s about staying out of such situations and that’s why Purdue and those like it have to good collectively, and where it’s fallen short this season for some reason.

Yeah, there’s surprisingly been more switching this season, which has been a mixed bag, but even when Purdue is chased out of it, outcomes don’t vary much. There’s no right answer in the short term beyond the assets on the floor banding together, buying in, talking to one another and trying to go out in a blaze of glory. And for Matt Painter and staff holding a team it has come to treat as much as peers as subjects accountable in no uncertain way.

All outcomes, at both ends of the spectrum, remain on the table. Some of them are dreams, but some of them nightmares.