GoldandBlack.com 2026-2027 Purdue Basketball Definitive Prospectus: Version 1.0

For the first time in four years, Purdue basketball will look very different from the teams you’ve seen year to year for nearly half a decade.

With last week’s de facto news that everyone slated to return next season for the Boilermakers will, on the heels of one of the great senior classes in school history departing, GoldandBlack.com takes a really early stab at projecting the 2026–27 Boilermakers.

Understand that this will be one of the most important offseasons in quite some time for Purdue, which has to maybe not reinvent itself per se, but establish new identities with new faces throughout the course of the summer and into the fall.

As new information comes to light, we’ll continually revise.

PURDUE GUARDS AND WINGS

“Loaded” is a big word, but in the backcourt, this is much more of a reload than a rebuild. There are no real established stars back, but the term “loaded” is not without merit.

Sophomore Omer Mayer might be a budding star once he gets cast into a much-expanded role, as he will this season. CJ Cox and Gicarri Harris have been outstanding role guys with high-level winning DNA about them and tremendous winning experience as college basketball players. This is their opportunity now to get more for themselves and to take their respective next steps as players, which they must do now that they’re not orbiting Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer anymore.

Redshirt freshman Antione West and incoming rookie Luke Ertel are both really highly regarded newcomers who will help Purdue from Day 1. How much, we’ll see. But they’re both two-way players who are huge pieces of Purdue’s future. And the future is now.

Freshman Jacob Webber is one of the elite tough-shot-makers in his class nationally. He’ll have a chance this summer to earn a spot and give Purdue an element in that sense it might not otherwise have.

PURDUE FRONTCOURT

This is a rebuild.

Purdue is still going to add a piece, but it added the biggest it could’ve gotten back in the winter when forward Caden Pierce committed after a great career at Princeton, where he was Ivy League Player of the Year as a sophomore. He will step right into a huge role at Purdue in his one and only season as a Boilermaker.

He and returnee Jack Benter — a revelation as a redshirt freshman this season — will make Purdue a little bit more multidimensional than they have been in years at the 4, probably the most multidimensional offensively they’ve been since Vince Edwards. And while they might be smaller than what Purdue has been playing in recent years, their mobility on defense might give Purdue a little bit of an advantage that could dull whatever disadvantages come from power and size.

As for center, Daniel Jacobsen’s time is now. The third-year player was set back in his development by the broken leg that cost him his freshman season, but looks most of the way caught up to where he should be, it seems, and now is the time to take another big step because he may slide into one of the best jobs in college basketball as Purdue’s frontcourt foundation.

Purdue does need to add another body to its center mix, but whether that player would be a starter type or just someone to complement Jacobsen and a depth piece remains to be seen. Based on what we know right now, Jacobsen would be the odds-on favorite to be Purdue’s primary post-touch guy offensively and the centerpiece of its defensive scheme given his rim-protection capabilities. If we wipe the injury season from the record, this is now the Year 1-to-Year 2 window in which so many players have blown up.

A bit of an X-factor will be redshirt sophomore Raleigh Burgess, coming off his first season in years that he spent entirely healthy. He is bigger and stronger and probably has refined his skills a little bit more than when you last saw him as a true freshman, but his energy alone could conceivably be a real jolt for Purdue, whether that’s at forward or center. He can play both. If Purdue has a plan for him, it is not completely evident at this point and may depend on what the roster ultimately looks like after the transfer portal closes.

It’s also not outside the realm of possibility that fifth-year senior Sam King could find a reserve role in some capacity. He obviously has experience, and try-hard guys like him have found valuable roles at Purdue in the past. And with the frontcourt fray being completely open right now, ruling anything out would be premature.

Freshman center Sinan Huan is huge, with all the physical potential imaginable. It would be a big ask of him to put him out there as a rookie in a major role, but again, it’s early. Same for incoming forward Rivers Knight. Both those players are long-term prospects.

PURDUE OFFENSIVE OUTLOOK

Purdue has been one of the best and most consistent offensive programs in college basketball for the majority of the past decade and has done so with very different sets of personnel and in very different ways.

It is very difficult this far out to really predict with any sort of certainty what Purdue’s M.O. offensively might be next season, as this will be a critical summer of discovery and reinvention for Matt Painter, P.J. Thompson, etc.

The key components won’t change…

• Paint touches
• Three-point shooting
• Possessions via keeping turnover totals in check and ideally productive offensive rebounding

Things have normally originated inside-out, though the inside part of it could sometimes mean pick-and-roll touches. Whether this is an inside-out sort of offense or not is obviously one of those many things to be figured out during these next six months or so.

There’s no telling what Purdue will look like come September, but as of right now, your starting point offensively would seem to be presumed point guard Omer Mayer. We say “presumed” simply because we are assuming Purdue is going to make him their lead guard after he played both point guard and in an off-the-ball offensive role as a freshman this past season. He can do either, and he can do either of them equally effectively, most likely. He is probably going to be Purdue’s best shot creator and playmaker.

We say “probably” because we don’t know what Antione West is going to look like once he gets into the deep end of Purdue’s practices. There’s also no telling how much CJ Cox and Gicarri Harris can expand themselves as true primary ball-handler types as veterans now with so much experience behind them. And we have no idea what accomplished freshman Luke Ertel might be able to bring to the table once he gets in a Purdue uniform this summer.

But based on what we know right now, the best assumption seems to be Purdue giving the ball to Mayer like it told him it would in recruiting and letting him go out there and score and make plays off his scoring. It can run a lot of the same stuff with Mayer that it did with Braden Smith.

Mayer is a deadly mid-range shooter out of pick-and-roll and did a surprisingly good job shooting spot-up threes last season. Whether that’s going to be enough to be a leading scorer-type influence for Purdue, we’ll see, but he does have a full offseason now of skill development ahead of him and a long professional background prior to that. So if there’s a potential breakout player for Purdue this coming season, there are a couple of candidates, but Mayer probably tops the list, if for no other reason than his usage will erupt.

The frontcourt can contribute to its own spacing, as Jacobsen, Benter, Burgess and Pierce can all, at worst, competently shoot threes. How much Purdue will want to leverage that is up to their summers.

Purdue always involves its center in its offense. Jacobsen has shown he can be a pick-and-roll presence as a lob threat — and a year spent getting shamelessly beat up by Big Ten opponents will prepare him for what’s coming — but coaches would love for him to develop more of a back-to-the-basket sort of game, too, whether it’s traditional post-ups or with him rolling into deep touches out of pick-and-roll. As he keeps building his size and strength, it will come along, most likely, as will the trickle-down musts of passing out of help, etc.

Pierce and Benter make for a pretty interesting combination at the 4, assuming that’s where Benter spends the majority of his minutes again. Both players’ skill sets are worth exploring as screeners, as both of them can shoot threes, dribble off of closeouts, and maybe get all the way to the rim at times, Pierce especially. Benter should be one of Purdue’s best passers next season, and that’s something that Purdue is going to want to leverage. You also saw glimpses of his ability to bring smaller players into the post and out-physical them. That is going to be worth exploring too. Benter might quickly establish himself as one of Purdue’s most complete offensive players and his usage mechanisms might reflect it.

Pierce’s athleticism and length are a plus.

Both of them might be able to create some advantages via scheme and strategy.

Further, it’s up to coaches to put personnel in positions to produce.

Getting Cox into his pull-up jumper or generating angles for Harris to use his size and dimensions to get to the basket should be priorities, too. Both players might be well-suited for traditional Purdue motion offense in those senses.

An unknown: How ready will West be to not just be a contributor but a difference-maker? He has leading-scorer potential. But at what point in his career?

This is a really important player development summer for Purdue, for everyone, up and down the roster. That wasn’t necessarily the case every off-season lately, but right now every player on this roster controls their own destiny in terms of opportunity. And Painter and staff have much to figure out.

PURDUE DEFENSIVE OUTLOOK

The Boilermakers have been elite offensively, but that has been a double-edged sword, maybe. If potent offense cannibalized Purdue players consistently buying into being good defensively, then that’s really regrettable. Look no further than this past regular season for the ramifications of such attitude.

If elite offense was the crutch Purdue could hold itself up on in recent years, now more than ever Purdue cannot take anything for granted. The program simply has to get back to being, at worst, solid on defense every year. If you just match elite offense with solid defense, you are staying among the country’s best teams every season. Staying elite offensively is not guaranteed, all the more reason for the defensive piece of it to come to the forefront now. Don’t think for a second it’s not always a priority as long as Painter is coaching this program, but the results just have not been there. The inconsistency has been maddening around West Lafayette.

Now, there is no alternative.

We wouldn’t necessarily expect Purdue to completely rebuild itself defensively and change its system and all that stuff, but you never know. Again, that’s what the summer is for. And we’ll see what Purdue’s frontcourt ultimately looks like.

But Jacobsen would seem like a classic drop-coverage sort of center, and in Cox, Harris, West, and Ertel, Purdue has a bunch of players who should be good on-ball defenders. When you have enough capable on-ball defenders to have the luxury to move somebody off the ball, then you’re in a pretty good spot. But Purdue has to be good on the ball first and foremost.

As of right this second, they don’t appear to be as many players on the roster that opponents are going to be happy to target in switches, but surely presumed weak links will be discovered in time. But this is a bit of a more interchangeable cast of personnel than Purdue has had in the past.

Pierce should be one of the more switchable forwards Purdue has had, and his athleticism and length add a couple of valuable assets to the aggregate defensive picture. But this is going to be a different system and different level of defense than he saw at Princeton, though it bears mentioning, one of his best games came in a win over Rutgers when it had two top-five draft picks.

Benter is probably never going to be a great lockdown defender, but as a 4-man he’s a plus from a mobility perspective, and his IQ is off the charts, as evidenced by the number of charges he took this past season in an era where taking charges is virtually impossible.

The biggest question is a critical, make-or-break one: Can Purdue rebound? We’ll see here in the next few weeks if Purdue is able to add something of value to its frontcourt, but as of right now, Purdue is a bit light up front, putting at risk one of its more consistent strengths of late: rebounding. The 4-men are smaller. Jacobsen is not yet a dominant physical force and may never be. So there’s a lot to figure out here. But this is a critical, critical question.

The most important part of defense is the rebound.