Edey’s throwback game might not work in NBA
DETROIT — The coaches at the training ground where Purdue basketball star Zach Edey honed his game hear it all the time from big men.
“A lot of guys get here, and they’re, like, ‘I’m a guard,’” said Daniel Santiago, the 7-foot-1 former NBA player who counts Edey among the 7-footers he has worked with at IMG Academy, the sportsfocused prep boarding school in Bradenton, Florida. “And then I’m like, ‘OK, well, can you do things that guards are supposed to do?’”
At 7-4 and 300 pounds, Edey never fought that battle. Since he hit his growth spurt in ninth grade, he has been pegged as a classic, low-post center. Over the past two years, he has become the best in the country — maybe the world? — at the lost art of playing with his back to the basket.
And yet there’s a sense that whenever the senior’s run through college hoops comes to an end — whether that’s Sunday, when his top-seeded Boilermakers (32-4) face secondseeded Tennessee (27-8) in the NCAA tournament Midwest Region final in Detroit, or next weekend at the Final Four in the Phoenix area — his future in the game he devoted himself to when his strike zone became too big for baseball might be limited.
Basketball has become a “positionless” sport dictated by analytics. Most teams find more value in shooting a higher volume of lower-percentage 3-point attempts than grinding for easy 2-point shots.
“It’s something I’m not shying away from, but I just happen to have Zach Edey,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said of the positionless game. “I’m a fool if I don’t anchor it around him.” It’s working at Purdue. Edey has his team within one win of the program’s first Final Four trip since 1980. He is the nation’s leading scorer and second-leading rebounder. He is a unanimous AP first-team All-American and is in the mix to become the first player to win AP’s men’s basketball player of the year award multiple times since another post-up big man, Ralph Sampson, did it in the early 1980s for the Virginia Cavaliers.
Whether Edey and his game will work in the NBA is another question.
Every player there, whether they’re 5-9 or 7-2, is more or less expected to have the 3-pointer in his repertoire. Edey has attempted two all year. Great post men of the past — Los Angeles Lakers greats Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal come to mind — would be considered inefficient these days, maybe even relics of a game that has changed with the times.
Even today’s big men — think San Antonio Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama, who is also 7-4 but weighs close to 90 pounds less than Edey, or the Denver Nuggets’ 6-11 Nikola Jokic, a two-time league MVP — are looking to pass from the perimeter and shoot from long range.
The trends tell the story of the NBA’s growing adoration of analytics:
› Since Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry, who has scored 47% of his career points from 3, joined the NBA in 2009-10, the average number of 3-point attempts has risen by 93%.
› Shots from behind the arc now make up 39.3% of all attempts, compared with 22.7% when Curry arrived.
› This season, 3-pointers account for 33.5% of teams’ points; that figure was 19.1% in 2009-10.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Edey’s standing in NBA mock drafts fluctuates wildly.
A few have him going late in the first round. Some have him in the second. If he’s a lottery pick as one of the first 14 players drafted, a consensus is that it would be in the latter half of that group, with draft analyst Kevin O’Connor saying the reason would be because Edey is “slower-footed,” “lacks a perimeter game” and is a “limited defender when pulled away from the basket.”
Any team that drafts Edey would have to reconstruct the way it plays, at least while he’s on the court. In college, at least, that causes opponents lots of problems, including foul trouble.
“He’s just an entity all to himself,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said in describing the rare challenge of dealing with a player who scored 27 points and grabbed 14 rebounds in Purdue’s Sweet 16 win over the Bulldogs on Friday night.
Santiago, who had two stints in the NBA and played in multiple leagues outside the mainland United States, said no team will find a harder worker who is willing to listen than Purdue’s big man. Edey grew up in Toronto, which has played into his development in an unexpected way.
“Maybe it’s because of his ice-skating background he always had a very good base,” Santiago said. “It’s very rare to see him fall to the ground. With all the people hanging on him and getting in his way, he’s done a very good job of staying on his feet, finishing strong. Sometimes it doesn’t even look like people are guarding him.”
Whether some NBA team decides to take a chance on Edey and his style of play will be seen when the draft arrives in June.
“End of the day, Zach is going to be one who has a lot of confidence in his game,” Santiago said. “And it’s a matter of who’s going to be willing to take that opportunity.”