How Purdue basketball star Zach Edey confounds defenses: Its just a helpless feeling ·

04 Jun 2024, 00:00

COLUMBUS, Ohio – On the third afternoon of January, Owen Spencer is seven inches taller and 65 pounds heavier and a Canadian. He calls for the ball on one end of the Schottenstein Center floor, receives it, takes two dribbles against an imaginary defender and flips in a right-handed hook. A couple minutes later, it’s two screens set on thin air, a roll into the lane and a lefty hook. On the next sequence, it’s three dribbles from the right block, followed by three pivots and three shot fakes and a request from an impatient teammate.

“Go up, Zach!” Colby Baumann barks from the wing, and Spencer scoops a layup off the glass. This is not an identity crisis. This is temporary scout-team reality. Spencer, a walk-on junior, is a national player of the year favorite. A wonder of the college basketball world. Big Spence is the Big Maple. He is Zach Edey, because he’s the closest thing Ohio State has to the real thing.

Which isn’t close at all.

Still, Purdue will be here in two days, bringing its 7-foot-4, 285-pound kaiju with it. How do you prepare to deal with Zach Edey this year? It’s a dilemma with many possible responses, based on The Athletic’s conversations with multiple coaches who’ve been forced to find one. Some teams use one defender. Some teams send multiple bodies. Some do a little bit of everything. None of them honestly expect any of it to work. No one tries to stop Edey. They try to endure him.

Here at Ohio State, the process begins on a Sunday afternoon and essentially ends on a Wednesday evening, with pretty much every moment in between dedicated, directly or indirectly, to minimizing Edey’s impact. The Buckeyes are a well-coached top 25 outfit with the personnel to mix up coverages and maybe, just maybe, mix up the biggest deal in the sport.

After two days of behind-the-scenes observation, their plan looks good. Their plan looks solid. And a plan only goes so far.

“It’s just something you don’t see every day,” Ohio State assistant coach Jack Owens says. “You don’t see a guy like that walking on campus. You don’t see him at the mall or the grocery store. It’s just something that’s not normal.”

The challenge is a CGI creation breathed into existence.

With Purdue’s center position all to himself in 2022-23, Edey logs about 31 minutes per game. That’s an 11-minute jump from last season. That’s 11 more minutes of leaning against the monster while he kicks down skyscrapers, because Edey is inevitable while he’s out there; as of Wednesday morning, only 21 players in the country have higher usage rates. Then Edey delivers 21.9 points per night on 63 percent shooting from the field and 74.5 percent efficiency from the free-throw line, good for the best offensive rating in the nation (129.4). He is No. 1 in both in Evan Miyakawa’s player ratings and KenPom.com’s player of the year rankings and is the nation’s leader in win shares and player efficiency rating, per Basketball Reference. KenPom calculates Edey has been Purdue’s game MVP 13 out of 16 times, and he missed one game because he was sick.

He is no fun. At all.

“He just asserts himself on the game,” Penn State coach Micah Shrewsberry says, not long after Edey asserted himself to 30 points against the Nittany Lions. “Zach is a problem.”

Size matters, but it’s really only the first threat level. Players who are just huge, and not a whole lot else, can be contained. Edey’s 88-inch frame is now a vessel. There’s a skilled, wizened and motivated basketball soul inhabiting it, compounding the challenge.

Dunks remain a core part of the arsenal, naturally, but Edey’s improved touch adds a dimension: He’s gone from 38.2 percent accuracy on hook shots as a freshman to 53.8 percent so far this year. “That’s pretty much an automatic two points, too,” Hofstra coach Speedy Claxton says. While Edey’s assist rate is down (16.1 percent as a sophomore to 10.8 percent as a junior), well, for one, he’s the focal point of Purdue’s offense. But, notably, the Boilermakers’ so-so 3-point shooting also has capped the effectiveness of kick-outs from the block. More telling is his career-low turnover rate (11.8 percent) despite all the attention he receives. It’s now difficult to make Edey uncomfortable, in any spot on the floor.

“He’s got a calmness to him this year,” Minnesota coach Ben Johnson says. “Sometimes with bigs you can maybe play that card — ‘OK, he’s not a great passer, or he doesn’t see it great, we can force him to get sped up.’ Man, this dude? The game has really slowed down for him.”

Purdue, not surprisingly, adds another layer by scheming Edey into the same position — somewhere near the rim — in a variety of ways. He’ll set high ball screens. He’ll set down screens for shooters. He’ll take a cross screen from the other big on the floor, to move from one side of the lane to the other. Matt Painter and Co. play all the angles to get Edey in position, and even when the offensive sets look familiar to those of previous years, one component of the personnel changes the calculus of the scout. “It’s never really been nearly as effective, because he can catch it from 12 feet away and might as well be catching it two feet from the rim,” Davidson coach Matt McKillop says. “And that’s because he’s one pivot away from a dunk.”

As for the prowess unmeasured by available metrics: A 7-4, 285-pound human doesn’t stop. Ever. All gas for three-quarters of every game. “He’s one of the best culture guys in the country,” Marquette coach Shaka Smart says. “Usually with bigs, you have to pump them up and rev them up. Watching the guy play, there’s a real joy and competitive fire that he has. That’s incredibly contagious. And when it comes from your best player, who’s also a mountain of a man, it just carries more weight than when it comes from a 6-foot guard.”

So what do you do about … that?

It’s a variety show, night-to-night. Marquette opted to wage war with Edey to push him as far off the block as it could, then trap according to its usual defensive rules. It worked fine for a half, but Edey still scored 20 points on 8-of-11 shooting.

Minnesota elected to play Edey straight-up, deciding that it didn’t have enough scoring punch to keep up with Purdue otherwise. In preparation, the Gophers’ bigs were forbidden from challenging post entries (because it’s impossible to deny Edey catches in a game) and from attempting to block the scout-team center’s shots (because they wouldn’t be able to swat Edey’s attempts in reality). Edey missed five of his first six shots … and then finished with 31 points in a win.

After picking up a foul while guarding Edey in the first minute, Minnesota freshman Joshua Ola-Joseph — all 6-7, 215 pounds of him — walked to the bench and offered one thought to his coaches: I don’t know what you want me to do. “It’s just a helpless feeling,” Johnson says. “They do everything they can and it’s just like, fellas? Genetics. I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell you.”

Hofstra likewise tweaked its basketball reality in preparation — Claxton declared any deep post catch in practice to be an automatic two points — and then out of sheer necessity trapped Edey as soon as he touched the ball. “God bless whoever plays him one-on-one,” Claxton says. Edey had 23 points and just two turnovers in 31 minutes against the Pride. Davidson mimicked Nebraska’s scheme and kept a guard low via switches, such that it was more or less doubling Edey before any pass was in the air. “Space has to be ours before he takes it,” is how McKillop put it to his team. Edey finished with 29 points, but gambling that Purdue wouldn’t feed off open 3s nearly worked; the rest of the Boilermakers shot poorly and the Wildcats hung tight all the way in an eight-point loss.

Even triple-teams, like this one by Davidson, aren’t always effective against Zach Edey. (Trevor Ruszkowski / USA Today)

Yet it also underscored a more subtle danger of having Zach Edey on your schedule. Davidson’s plan against Purdue was a one-off. A specialty brew. The Wildcats returned to their usual principles four days later against Northeastern … and lost in large part due to defensive discombobulation.

In the end? Edey beat Davidson twice. “We built those habits to beat Purdue, and all of a sudden we were in the wrong position constantly in our next game,” McKillop says. “Because you basically have to create an entire game plan that you’re never going to have to do against anybody else.”

There is no one thing to do. No set plan that works. As McKillop puts it: Playing against Edey means you’re constantly at a disadvantage. You choose the best path forward.

And hope.

“It’s just a matter of time,” Johnson says. “It just wears you down. They got 10 more minutes out of this guy this year. It’s like, what do you do?”

Chris Holtmann occupies a seat in the lower level of the Schottenstein Center, as calm as someone bouncing around the DEFCON spectrum can be. He is in his sixth year as Ohio State’s coach, but the last two-plus are front of mind. He has seen Zach Edey, then and now. He’s enviously chill about the “now” version hitting town. Then again, what else can you do when you see the tsunami crest and realize there’s nowhere to run? “He’s the most dominant player in college basketball, offensively,” Holtmann says. “Very rarely in college basketball, or really any level of basketball, do you have to game plan for a guy of this ability and physical prowess.”

This is one of those very rare times. His Buckeyes, at the moment, have won three in a row. They are not ultra-stingy — 65th in adjusted defensive efficiency before facing Purdue — but they are coming off a game in which they bugged Northwestern into missing 45 of its first 55 shots. They have a sandpaper senior big man in Zed Key, who has bodied up against Edey before, and a lithe but feisty 6-11 freshman in Felix Okpara. The guards and wings are athletic enough to scramble around and handsy enough to bother Purdue on the perimeter. These are the tools in the box.

Owens, Holtmann’s defensive coordinator, begins his film study on the afternoon of the Northwestern game — nothing more to do there before tipoff. But the coaching staff as a whole doesn’t discuss the Boilermakers until Monday. For Holtmann, the first question with any dominant post player is: Can we guard him one-on-one for 40 minutes? The answer, this time, is a decisive no. This alone crystallizes matters. Ohio State’s staff is left to decide how to support its post defenders, in line with the various ways it has worked on trapping opposing bigs since as far back as the second week of practice.

It will not be a total transformation. It can’t be, if they want clear-eyed effort from the players. “You want to take as much thinking out of it as possible and stick to what you do,” Owens says. So the plan unfolds. They’ll be physical with Edey as soon as possible on every possession and stay connected to his body, as hazardous as that is, in order to win even a couple inches of positioning. They’ll slough off certain shooters for an almost Davidson-like pre-pass double-team, aiming to “shrink the floor,” as Holtmann puts it. The Buckeyes haven’t trapped the post a ton — North Carolina’s Armando Bacot was one exception — but they’ll take an all-of-the-above approach with Edey, sending an extra defender at different times and from different spots: off the dribble or off the catch, from the top and from the weak side, any and all of it.

No steady diet of coverage. Ohio State will serve from the buffet. “He’s too good a passer at this point,” Holtmann says of the need to mix it up, “and they’re too cerebral of a team.”

Every iota of prep follows these rules. For two days at the Schottenstein Center, you feel the gravitational pull of Zach Edey, hundreds of miles away.

Within a half-hour of the first pre-Purdue practice, Ohio State jumps into a five-on-five defensive shell drill, choreographed according to game-specific strategy. There are constant reminders of what’s coming. A secondary defender either lurks near Spencer, the 6-foot-9, 215-pound walk-on stand-in, or fully commits to double coverage when he has the ball in his hands. Reminders about points of emphasis come just as strong. When Spencer has it a little too easy in one sequence, assistant coach Mike Netti throws a rhetorical question at the group. “We gonna be that soft on Edey?” Netti says, with Holtmann backing up his point. “Coach is right,” Holtmann says. “Gotta be more physical.”

The Buckeyes gotta be a lot of things. Vigilant, for one. Relaxing after the ball is returned to the perimeter? Not an option. “They’re not going to give up after one post feed,” Holtmann tells his team.

Courageous, for another. Give Edey some space, so as to lessen the risk of an elbow to your skull? Nope, as Okpara learns when he catches an errant body part to the face during one drill. “You have to embrace what this game’s about,” assistant coach Jake Diebler says. “Your eye is going to get poked. You’re going to get popped in the jaw. You gotta play on.”

Careful, for sure. Key grabs a hold of Spencer as a post feed sails out of bounds, and multiple Ohio State staffers throw their hands up. “That’s a foul, Zed,” Holtmann says, by way of follow-up. “Understand — the officials are going to be all over how we guard him. Your technique has to be impeccable.”

The message echoes in every space. On the Tuesday before the game, Ohio State settles into the film room for personnel review. Before the clips roll, Holtmann asks his veterans what they remember about Purdue’s physicality. Owens informs the players that they need to hit first and ask questions later. Edey, alone, consumes more than five minutes of the scout, or roughly 25 percent of the total meeting.

There’s a clip of Edey in transition, and a reminder to meet him early with physicality in any scenario. (“It’s gotta be an 8-foot jump hook, not a 4-foot jump hook,” Netti says.) There’s a clip of Edey working off the bounce (“On the crab dribble, fight for every inch.”). There’s a clip of Edey sealing a defender way too deep for anyone’s comfort. (“The low man wins. Get to his knees, get to his hips, push him out.”) There’s a clip of Edey, at the time second nationally in offensive rebounds, chasing down his own miss. “He can’t throw us around,” Netti says, wrapping it up. “Guards have to jump in the game. Bigs, you have to move him. It’s gotta be a team effort. Have to push him off the glass. Obviously 7-4, he’s averaging 12, 13 rebounds a game. Not Thursday.”

Ohio State’s preparation for Edey is, ultimately, everything you’d expect. A “War Rebounding” drill, to get a relatively undersized group ready for the battle to come. Cat-and-mouse close-out drills, in which the guards and wings dig at the post. Reminding Spencer to start sets with his head under the rim. Reminding the entire scout team that the “play after the play,” as Holtmann puts it, is feeding the post again. It feels like so much and not enough, all at once.

Even Holtmann grasps the absurdity in it. He thinks back to telling Okpara that guarding Purdue’s center is a simple leverage play, and he laughs. A 220-pound freshman has no leverage to play. Not against Edey. But these are the things you say. These are the things you do. This is how you plan to ride the pororoca.

So last question, about 24 hours before seeing where this goes: Why does Ohio State’s coach think this approach will work for his group?

“Well, I don’t know that it will, to be honest with you,” Holtmann says. “This is our system. This is what we’re committed to. But we’ve never had to game plan for him for 32, 33 minutes. So I don’t know. But I feel like this gives us the best chance.”

We’re about four minutes in at the Schottenstein Center, and a piping-hot Thursday night crowd of 17,227 sees something they shouldn’t see. Zach Edey is in the middle of the lane, completely unguarded and begging for the ball. Ohio State appears to be out of sorts following a Purdue offensive rebound, somehow losing track of the biggest human in the building. But that’s not it. It’s worse than that.

Just as Edey receives a pass, pivots and scores his first bucket on a two-hand dunk, Zed Key shuffles back into the play. He clutches at his left shoulder, which hangs limp at his side. Something happened during the tussle for the rebound, and now a whistle stops play. The senior big man disappears into an arena tunnel with an athletic trainer. Ohio State’s primary defender on Edey is done for the night. The plan, theoretically, goes boom.

In reality, it does and it doesn’t.

An early injury to Zed Key, right, disrupted Ohio State’s game plan against Zach Edey. (Dylan Buell / Getty Images)

Key’s injury is a cannonball to the gut, and Ohio State has to increase the help it will give Okpara and whoever else has the assignment for the next 36 minutes. But the Buckeyes don’t come apart. Okpara is up to the task. (The freshman doesn’t even commit a foul until late in the second half.) The traps keep coming. Purdue’s post-feeders are regularly annoyed by Ohio State’s guards deflecting their entries or applying enough ball pressure that the passes sail out of bounds. The Boilermakers, meanwhile, can’t hit 3s to capitalize on a defense in rotations. Ohio State’s lead swells to as much as 12 points. After a right-handed hook from the Big Ten logo misses at the halftime buzzer, Edey claps his hands in frustration and walks off the floor. He’s made two shots and zero free throws and is a minus-5 for his team. The plan, unbelievably, is holding up.

When the final horn sounds and Ohio State takes a 71-69 loss into the locker room, it’s a lesson in inevitability. Edey finishes with 16 points and 10 rebounds. That’s empirically a win. But Purdue starts running guards from the ball-side corner to the weak side, leaving no defender to cheat toward Edey before the post-feed comes. A team that hasn’t trapped much all season gets loose with its defensive rotations as the game wears on. All that, plus Edey’s maturation as a passer, means Purdue hits 13 3s by the end.

One of them, from freshman guard Fletcher Loyer with 11 seconds left, is the game-winner. Edey gets the assist on it, after Ohio State comes with one last double-team. It’s his fourth dime. A new season-high.

Make your choices. Craft your plans. Maybe it works and you win. Or Zach Edey finds a way, someone else hits a shot, and you don’t. “A lot of people look at things in theory and say, ‘Your best player has to take the last shot,’” Purdue coach Matt Painter says after the game. “Your best player has to make the best decision. You can’t dictate everything.”

No, you cannot, which Holtmann understands too well as he briskly walks through the arena loading dock late on this midwinter Thursday.

He’s pissed. Smoke out of the ears, talking in clipped sentences, biting his tongue about a non-call on Ohio State’s last possession. The plan was good. It stayed good even when it should’ve fallen apart after Key’s injury. It was so close to good enough, and he’s understandably chafed it wasn’t. “I didn’t like our rotations,” Holtmann says. “It changed a little bit with Zed being out so early. Yeah, just didn’t like our rotations. So.”

And that’s that. Full commitment, flushed. A headlong dive into the Zach Edey problem, beside the point by sunrise.

Ohio State has another game in three days. No time to wonder what more could’ve been done, at least for now. The Buckeyes play Purdue again on Feb. 19. They have to do this all over again anyway.

(Illustration by John Bradford / The Athletic; Photo: Graham Stokes / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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How Purdue basketball star Zach Edey confounds defenses: Its just a helpless feeling

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