Edey powers Boilermakers into Final Four
By the time all the scrapping and scratching and diving on the floor was over, it felt like a shame that both those teams, and both those players, weren’t moving onto the Final Four. Just don’t expect Purdue to feel bad about it.
Boilermakers big man Zach Edey scored a career-high 40 points Sunday to muscle Purdue within two wins of the NCAA title for the first time since 1980 with a 72-66 victory over Dalton Knecht and his neversay-quit Tennessee teammates.
The seven-foot-four Edey, a unanimous AP all-American, didn’t even need a ladder to cut down the net after edging out Knecht, another all-American, who finished with 37 points.
The game’s top two players and their teams went back and forth all day. How close was it? There were six ties and eight lead changes. With five minutes left and the score knotted 58-58, both players had scored 31 points on 12 field goals. According to OptaSTATS, this was the first time opposing players scored more than half their squads’ points in an NCAA Tournament game.
“You’re not trying to take away 100 per cent, you’re trying to take away maybe 80 per cent of what he’s trying to get accomplished,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said of Knecht. “But we don’t take Zach for granted. He could’ve scored 50 tonight if he’d made his free throws.”
Edey, from Toronto, missed eight of his 22 attempts from the foul line. One of those misses sparked the play of the game. After Tennessee grabbed the rebound and worked the ball downcourt, Edey swatted away Knecht’s layup as he drove to the basket while trailing by five with 33 seconds left.
It was Edey’s only block of the day, and it put an end to the Volunteers’ desperate comeback hopes.
“I was just trying to get back, and make my presence felt on the defensive end of the court, and make up for it,” Edey said.
Top-seeded Purdue (33-4) set aside last year’s grand disappointment — a first-round loss as a No. 1 seed — to book the trip to Glendale, Ariz.
Edey and the Boilermakers will face big man DJ Burns Jr. and 11thseeded North Carolina State in the national semifinals. The Wolfpack beat Duke 76-64 Sunday.
“We had to take it,” Painter said of the abuse that came last year. “Sometimes when you sit in it and you’re honest with yourself and you take it, some great things can happen.”
This was a slugfest of a game, a welcome break from the action over the first two weeks of a March Madness that has been more sleepy than mad. It was played in front of an ear-splitting crowd packed with Purdue fans who made their way up from Indiana. They were looking for history, and they got it — along with the game ball that Boilermakers guard Fletcher Loyer chucked about 20 rows into the crowd when the buzzer went off.
The school’s 87-year-old former coach, Gene Keady, watched from the stands — then, afterward, came onto the floor to receive a piece of the freshly cut net from Edey. “It shows people if you do things the right way, it will pay off,” the former coach said.
At times, the game looked like the sort Keady might have coached back in the 1980s and ’90s, as Purdue pounded the ball to Edey in the post.
The coup de grace came with Tennessee trying to carve into a 69-64 deficit. Knecht drove down the lane and went up, but Edey, who played just a few seconds short of the full 40 minutes, scooted over and cleanly swatted the shot.
“A great play, you’ve got to give him credit,” Barnes said.