MINNEAPOLIS — Around 2 p.m. local time Friday, with his right leg stretched out and swathed in ice, Braden Smith was asked yet again about the moment that had aged Purdue men’s basketball fans to a disturbing degree. Because the inquiring mind belonged to teammate Chase Martin and not a media member milling about the locker room, this version was a little more blunt and a little less sanitized.
He drove to the rim. Michigan State’s Tyson Walker swiped down hard. Walker missed the ball and hit Smith’s leg. The contact hyperextended his knee. In conclusion?
“That s— hurt,” Smith declared.
Were you in need of oxygen at the time, the Target Center was the place to be, as anyone with a passing interest in the Boilermakers ceased breathing for a while. All is well after a 67-62 win in the Big Ten tournament quarterfinals. But not before scare piled upon scare, not before an All-Big Ten bellwether hopped off the floor and crumpled to the ground, not before these poor souls in black and gold wondered what they’d done to deserve this.
Badgers in the semis.
⏰: 1 p.m. ET
📺: CBS pic.twitter.com/ahEZVi5vmo— Purdue Men’s Basketball (@BoilerBall) March 15, 2024
It might be, in some ways, helpful. Even auspicious. No one but Zach Edey shot well. The physicality was such that officials actually checked the floor for blood splatters at halftime. The 6-foot roll of barbed wire who plays point guard was in foul trouble in the first half and possibly seriously injured in the second. And Purdue found a way to avoid an upset in March. Its fans might prefer that this happens without the need for smelling salts or powerful antacids, yes. But a way was found nevertheless.
If the dread sight of Smith needing help to leave the floor didn’t shake Purdue, then maybe nothing truly will.
“We all have a bad taste of what happened last year, and the media keeps reminding us,” forward Mason Gillis said in the locker room afterward. “That’s constant motivation.”
No one anywhere is more valuable than Edey. A 7-foot-4 two-time Big Ten Player of the Year is a fairly large thumb on that scale. But Smith’s indispensability to this group and its cause is not up for debate, either. No one can make a realistic case for Purdue achieving NCAA Tournament deliverance without the guard whose player efficiency rating (20.1) and Win Shares total (4.8) ranked second among Boilermakers going into the postseason, who assists on 36.5 percent of his team’s buckets when he’s on the floor, whose overall year-to-year growth is a massive factor in Purdue having its highest adjusted efficiency margin (+29.58) of the KenPom era.
So when Smith tweaked that knee and hopped off the playing floor and crumpled to the ground with 12:27 to play on Friday, it was potentially cataclysmic. End-of-days stuff.
“You could’ve heard a pin drop, I think, as he was getting tended to there,” forward Ethan Morton said. “It definitely felt like longer than whatever time it was that he was in the locker room.”
About four game minutes, officially, between Smith heading back for medical attention and returning to the scorer’s table. Unofficially? It might as well have been a century or two.
Never mind the hundreds on hand without a view of him once he was helped into the Target Center tunnel. Not even Smith knew how Smith was doing.
“Anything with the knee is a little intimidating,” he said later. “I was hoping nothing happened.”
After the obligatory checks and some light jogging, Purdue’s medical staff asked Smith if he thought he could go.
“I was like, I feel like I have to,” Smith said. “That’s just how I am. If something’s not falling off me or I’m not throwing up, I feel like I should be out there playing.”
The knee clearly bothered him and he wasn’t overly aggressive upon his return, but Smith did just enough, including recording the assist on a Fletcher Loyer 3-pointer with 1:21 left that put Purdue ahead for good. Loyer put his index finger to his lips and talked enough trash to infuriate the Michigan State bench after that sequence. Still, even that bit of pique might be construed as a plus in this postseason, at least by Boilermakers faithful: It was only Loyer’s second bucket of the game. His self-esteem didn’t suffer for it. Clearly.
Good signs, in the world according to West Lafayette. None better than Smith checking back in Friday afternoon, of course, or the relative nonchalance the sophomore demonstrated in the locker room a little while later. While Purdue coach Matt Painter cautioned that Smith’s knee could be perfectly fine or get even worse by the time a semifinal game rolled around, Smith offered a different prognosis.
“I’m playing,” Smith said.
For anything to go the way Purdue wants it to go, he certainly has to.
(Photo: Matt Krohn / USA Today)
