BY HENRY ABBOTT
For about 10 minutes, the game mirrored the hype.
The media loves a clash of titans. UConn’s 7-2 bruiser, Donovan Clingan, was the nimble little one in this battle as the man trying to push him around the paint was Purdue’s 7-4, 300-pound Zach Edey.
Early in Monday’s NCAA championship game, Edey battled Clingan, Clingan battled Edey, and both made clear why basketball players lift weights. As arms snaked around torsos and through armpits, in the post game’s perennial efforts to snake-charm referees (he’s holding me alleges the player with his enemy’s arm clamped in his armpit), the actual battle was a yard closer to the ground. Clingan put one leg back, sank into his knees to make his body the strongest possible stool, onto which Edey would drive his 300 pounds. If the stool held up, and Clingan kept Edey a decent distance from the rim, UConn would win.
It might seem weird that having two talented post-players play in the post was a strategy to favor one team over the other. But the more Clingan and Edey tangled over the short term, the more the long run would favor the strategy of UConn coach Dan Hurley. The bet was that Edey—in the conversation as the best college player ever, and the sun, moon, and star of the Boilermakers—would get tired.
It was still the first half when that strategy showed signs of working: Edey took a step that felt familiar to me as a former marathoner. Running five-or-10 miles fatigues your legs a certain way. Running 16, though, makes things weird and rubbery, so you worry more than usual about tipping right or left, or tripping on a curb or a tree root. I don’t know what causes that feeling, but I assume it’s nervous system fatigue—signals not firing in their customary patterns. Something’s depleted. Edey took a couple of tippy steps in traffic that made me wonder: Is he okay?
With a little over 13 minutes left in the first half, after Edey had skied for two huge blocks in a matter of seconds, announcer Bill Raftery hollered: “Do NOT go in there against Zach Edey!”
Edey didn’t get another block all game; soon UConn’s Tristen Newton was discovering that a good offensive strategy was to run right at Edey and score over him.
I thought Edey might need a rest. He has a backup: 6-10 former Indiana Mr. Basketball Caleb Furst has started more than 30 games for Purdue over the last few seasons, playing almost 1,500 minutes. But Purdue coach Matt Painter had kept Furst glued to the bench and Edey on the court, through the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, and the Final Four.
In the biggest moments of his college career, Edey would enjoy the least rest—like Jayson Tatum who led the league in playoff minutes then airballed four shots in one tired half of the 2022 NBA Finals.
College games are 40 minutes. Edey played 39 on March 29; 40 on March 31; 39 on April 6; then on Monday, April 8, Painter was saying he wouldn’t be taking Edey out. Furst ended up playing just long enough, 27 seconds of the first half, to foul Clingan once.
Purdue’s customary way to win games is to force defenses to collapse into the paint to cope with Edey—who can then score, get fouled, or as Painter says, “spray the ball around” to other scorers. The Boilermakers averaged eight made 3s a game.
But that plan needs several things to go right. Edey, who really only scores at the rim, must fight for and win deep positioning. Then his teammates must get him the ball. And finally, from there, Edey must be brilliant—quick-attack if single covered, recognize the double team, locate the open man, do all the things that lead to drawing fouls.
Against a skilled defense like UConn, and against a skilled defender like Clingan, a fresh Edey might be able to make that magic happen, but an exhausted player can do none of it. Purdue finished with zero passes leading to made 3s, no balls being “sprayed around,” and one made 3 in total.
Furst came in when Edey was starting to look not quite like himself. On the season, Edey grabbed a rebound every 2.6 minutes. As the first half marched into the second half, Edey went 12-plus minutes with just one rebound with smaller players outmaneuvering him. (This season, Furst averaged one rebound every 3.6 minutes.)
After the game, Painter would say his team’s inability to rebound decided the game. But it wasn’t just that Edey wasn’t rebounding. The two-time college player of the year also went the last six minutes of the first half, and the first six minutes of the second half, without scoring a single point. Over that time, UConn went from having a one-point lead to an 11-point lead.
Going into halftime Coach Painter kept banging his drum, telling reporter Tracy Wolfson that Purdue needed more from Edey.
The second half opened with aggressive Connecticut players slapping the ball out of Edey’s hands—twice while he tried to rebound and once on the way up to score. UConn’s Stephon Castle scored a wide-open layup at the rim because Edey hadn’t made it all the way back on defense. Clingan beat Edey to a missed UConn shot and tipped it in for a bucket.
Edey’s teammate Camden Heide made the highlight of his life by skying to dunk an Edey miss. The stadium nearly melted with applause; Edey barely had energy to smile. At the other end, Castle got an offensive board from the air above Edey and scored over him.
When Clingan left with foul trouble, Edey got deep position and caught the ball. Yet, when the double team came, Edey passed the ball over his teammate’s head and into the backcourt for a turnover.
Purdue switched to zone defense, which let Edey stand still in the paint for much of the defensive possession. The problem was that he stood still in the paint for too much of the defensive possession.
As Tracy Wolfson reported on her latest conversation with Coach Painter, who asserted, “We’re going to keep feeding it into Edey, over and over,” Edey stood flat-footed in the no-man’s land in the middle of defending a pick-and-roll. “SLAMSON JOHNSON!!” yelled Raftery, as Clingan’s backup Samson Johnson skied for a dunk to put UConn up 11.
On the bench with a towel around his neck, Clingan leapt more in celebration than Edey had on defense. Clingan could see that the strategy to wear Edey down was working.
Then Edey found himself guarded by the much smaller Johnson. Edey made a deep catch, passed back out; when Purdue missed a 3, Edey mistimed his effort going for the ball and trucked UConn’s Alex Karaban for a foul. On the next play, Edey watched as Johnson caught another alley-oop.
When Edey finally scored again, it was a miss—the ball never went in. But the referees ruled … something … and credited Edey with the bucket. The commentators speculated Clingan had put his hand in the cylinder, which would be goaltending, but as they spoke the replay showed Edey grabbing the rim, messing up his own shot as it bounced around.
Suddenly, it seemed like every UConn player wanted a chance to posterize Edey. “Oh, this kid!” yelled Raftery as the foot-shorter-than-Edey Cam Spencer hung in the air and dropped in a layup. Moments later the Huskies seemed to be up against the shot clock until Newton confidently headed for Edey and floated a tidy ball over the tired big man and into the bucket. Later, Karaban would sky for a dunk as Edey never jumped. Castle drove right at Edey, and scored over him as Edey couldn’t decide whether to leave Johnson to protect the rim.
With 11:31 left in the game, Edey kind of got a rebound, but Spencer ripped it away, which was called a foul. Edey, who led all of college in free throws attempted this season, stepped to the line and airballed. He stood there a moment, staring at the rim, then made a tossing motion with his right hand like he was going to throw that bad memory away.
Edey was, at that moment, a wonderful player playing so terribly it would cost him a title. Later, with the shot clock winding down, Edey fouled a 3-point shooter—a cardinal basketball sin.
By the time Edey scored a real bucket again, with 9:16 left in the game, Purdue was down 14 and ESPN Gamecast pegged UConn’s chances of winning at 97 percent. Edey ended up taking the most shots all season (25) and leading all scorers with 37. But somehow he’d scored almost all of them early in a feeling-out period or after the game had been decided.
“I can’t go through stretches where I’m not effective,” Edey would say after the game. “And I had a few of those stretches today, and that was the game.”
In the locker room, Edey said, “Obviously, you get tired.” He explained that the minute load he took on “wears down your legs.” But then Edey seemed to forget what he had just said and slipped into the magical thinking of positive self-talk, saying: “I don’t believe in getting tired. I think Purdue always needs me on the floor, and I think I always need to be productive. I don’t have time to be tired.”
After the game, Painter talked about playing “with a piano on your back.” He wasn’t talking about Edey, but that’s precisely how Edey looked, dragging all that fatigue up and down the court. Commentator Grant Hill, struggling to praise the fallen Painter, noted the Purdue coach had been “just consistent with his philosophy.”
Throughout the entire postgame press conference, not one media member asked Coach Painter if he regretted his decision not to rest Zach Edey.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!