The Boilermakers try for a season sweep of Rutgers at home on Tuesday night
Rutgers By the Numbers
If you’re looking for more Rutgers stats, here’s the link.
Purdue Basketball: Rutgers By The Numbers – Hammer and Rails
Rutgers This Season
Since we last saw the Scarlet Knights on January 9, they’ve won six games and lost seven. Their best wins over that stretch were home wins over UCLA (75-68) on January 12 and Illinois (82-73) on February 5. Their worst losses were at Penn State (80-72) on January 20 and at home against Iowa on February 12. They’ve won two of their last three games, with wins over Washington and USC and a loss on the road to Michigan *84-82) last Thursday. They’re 14-15 on the season and 7-11 in the Big Ten despite having two projected top-five NBA draft prospects in Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey.
As the season has progressed, Rutgers head coach Steve Pikiell has tried almost every possible rotation around Harper and Bailey to win more games. I had to make multiple changes to the roster section despite Purdue and Rutgers playing on January 9. Those changes mainly involved swapping our former transfer starters for former bench freshmen. On Tuesday night, the Scarlet Knights will start four freshmen and senior Temple transfer Jeremiah Williams. This is a young, athletic squad with athletes at every position, but they’re incredibly green and have struggled with consistency. That should look familiar to Purdue fans because the Boilermakers have also struggled to fill in the pieces around their core group.
Rutgers hasn’t been good this season, but they’re uber-talented. I don’t expect the Boilermakers to take them lightly tomorrow night.
Rutgers on Offense
Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey are the Rutgers offense. Jeremiah Williams will occasionally step up as a third option. Still, for the most part, it’s the freshman dynamic duo leading the way while everyone else picks up the scraps on offense. The thing is, Harper and Bailey are so talented that they don’t need much else on offense. Harper and Bailey combine for 58% of Rutgers’ shots, and I’m honestly surprised it’s not higher. Purdue should be familiar with playing against teams with two players that do most of the work on offense because they face a similar team in practice every day. TKR and Smith combine to take 56% of the Boilermakers’ shots.
Harper runs the show for Rutgers at 6’6”, 215 pounds. He has the ninth-highest usage rate in conference games (TKR is first, and Braden is tenth) and the twelfth-best conference assist rate. An underrated aspect of his game is his ability to get to the line. He’s seventh in the conference in fouls drawn per 40 minutes and hits the free ones at a 74% clip. If he turns the corner and gets both feet in the lane, it generally ends in a basket, a trip to the foul line, or a potential assist. He’s hitting 58% of his two-point baskets, and Purdue is giving up an absurdly high 56% shooting on twos, good for 340 in the nation and dead last in the Big Ten. If I’m coaching Rutgers, goal number one is to get Harper into the paint, either with a straight-line drive from the angle or off a high pick-and-roll. Once that happens, Purdue’s defense collapses, and Harper can either get to the rim and take on Purdue’s non-existent rim protection or kick out to a presumably open shooter. In addition to stressing the Boilermaker defense, any excursion into the lane brings Trey Kaufmann-Renn into play on defense. As we’ve all seen, Purdue struggles to function when their leading scorer is in foul trouble. Harper’s great at getting into a defender’s body and using his length to finish over them. I expect him to go at Trey any time he has the opportunity.
That brings me to Ace Bailey, the other outstanding freshman for Rutger’s. Bailey is a 6’10”, 200-pound early-career Kevin Durant clone. He can get to the basket from the top of the key with two loping steps or pull up and launch his unblockable jumper at any moment. Consistency has been an issue with Bailey recently, and I hope his current run of poor form continues tomorrow night. He hasn’t broken the 20-point barrier since he dropped 37 on Northwestern at Welsh Ryan. His near 40-point explosion was fueled by hitting five of his attempted eight offerings from behind the arc. Since that game on January 29, he’s a combined 5-of-27 from 3, including a 66-63 home loss to Michigan that saw him attempt seven three-pointers and connect on exactly none of them. It takes an incredible amount of confidence in your shot to go 0-7 from 3. I’d look for something else after missing the first five because Bailey can get any shot on the court he wants, but sometimes he chooses the easy way out with his jump shot.
February, in particular, was a tough month for Bailey, and his up and down performances are reflected in Rutgers record. I mentioned his dreadful shooting performance against Michigan, but he only put up four points in a road loss to Maryland. In fact, both Maryland and Oregon held him to single digits, and unsurprisingly, both of those games ended up in a Rutgers loss. Like Purdue, if their two leading scorers don’t both score, it’s tough for Scarlet Knights to find enough offense to make up for it. At the same time, when both Harper and Bailey are playing well, their team is significantly better than their record indicates. Purdue needs to shut down one of the two leading scorers on Rutgers, and the struggling Bailey seems like the best option. I expect the Boilermakers to play off, invite him to shoot perimeter jumpers, and do their best to keep his visits to the rim at a minimum. I think Purdue can pull that off. As I mentioned, Bailey loves his jumper, but it hasn’t dropped recently. I’m going to guess his legs are a bit dead as a true freshman averaging 30 minutes a game, and his jumper is the ultimate bail-out. He doesn’t have to work hard to get to it, and Purdue should encourage him in that endeavor. This looks like a job for Furst and Heide. At no point do I want to see Trey trying to check Bailey on the perimeter.
Outside of the “Big 2” of Rutgers, freshman center Lathan Sommerville gives me the most anxiety. Sommerville is a massive 6’10”, 275, but has surprisingly nimble feet for a big man. Trey has to guard someone, and Sommerville is most likely the matchup. He put up 17 points (including going 7-7 from the foul line) against Michigan’s massive front line and is tough to stop in the pick-and-roll from the top of the key with Harper. If he gets a pass, he can handle going toward the rim. It’s not his overall skill set that worries me. I think Trey can guard him in the paint, but his ability to finish and draw fouls when paired with Harper gives me the most concern. I say it in all of these previews, but if I’m the opposing coach, I target TKR with every drive and post up in my playbook to start the game, hoping to put him on the bench with foul trouble. Sommerville is the type of big, physical player Trey occasionally struggles not to foul. It’ll be incumbent on Purdue’s star big man to play straight up with Sommerville on defense and to not get sucked into committing stupid fouls trying to grab rebounds he’s no in position to grab.
Overall, Rutgers has proven to be a talented team of individual players this season who haven’t gelled as a team. The offense relies on the individual brilliance of a couple one-and-done freshmen, and short circuiting either of them makes winning a difficult proposition for the Scarlet Knights. If Harper and Bailey combine for 30 or fewer points, Purdue wins. If they hold them to a combined 40 or fewer points, I still think Purdue wins, but it could be closer than is comfortable. If they get to a combined 50 or more, the Boilermakers are in trouble. I don’t see that happening in Mackey Arena, but I didn’t see Wisconsin putting up 94 points in Mackey either, so take that with an entire block of salt.
Either way, the task is clear: limit Harper and Bailey’s combined damage, and I don’t see a way forward for Rutgers.
Rutgers on Defense
I’m pretty confident that if Rutgers could play marginal defense, they would be a lock for the NCAA Tournament. Since their currently a game under .500, you can extrapolate how defense has gone for Pikiell’s crew of youngsters.
Outside of blocking shots, Rutgers isn’t particularly good at much on defense in conference play. They’re fifteenth in the Big Ten in effective field goal percentage allowed (53.9%) and eighteenth in offensive rebound percentage allowed (32.1%). They’re thirteenth in three-point defense, giving up 35.2% from behind the arc, and fourteenth in two-point defense, allowing opponents to shoot 54.5%. Rutgers has lost four games this season when their offense scored 80+ points, including a loss to Alabama where they hit 90 points. Purdue only has one loss in the season, where the offense scored 80+ points (Wisconsin).
My only concern is the Rutgers pressure. I don’t think it will be a significant issue for Purdue. They are eleventh in the Big 10 in defensive turnover percentage (16.2%), but they ramped up their full-court press and half-court traps against Michigan in their last game and forced the Wolverines into 14 turnovers. They were in the perfect position to pull the road upset before collapsing down the stretch. They took a 57 – 49 lead into halftime and even managed to outscore Michigan 17-13 in the first ten minutes of the second half before the Wolverines ended the game on a 22-8 run that culminated in Nimari Burnett’s 3-pointer at the death to give Michigan a two-point victory.
They didn’t win at Michigan, but they showed they could have, and probably should have, won at Michigan. That will give them hope coming into this game, and they have the type of size and athletes on the perimeter that tend to provide Purdue with issues. If the Boilermakers keep the turnovers down and hit the open shots the Rutgers defense allows on most possessions, this game shouldn’t be a problem. If the shots don’t fall or the pressure bothers Purdue, Rutgers has enough on offense to get the job done.