Purdue Gets Another Road Win With Big Performance at Indiana
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Get hot, then stay hot. That's a good working formula for the Purdue Boilermakers these days.
The Boilermakers came to Bloomington and stole another win on the road, their second in eight days after opening the Big Ten with five straight conference losses. They throttled Indiana 74-62, raising their record to 7-6 in the league and 14-10 overall and drastically improving their NCAA Tournament resume.
The two teams traded punches for most of the first half before Purdue laid down the hammer, going on a 12-0 run to end the half, going into the locker room 37-28 lead.
“We were just trying to execute on the offensive end and then really limit them on the interior (during that stretch), Purdue coach Matt Painter said. "They have a lot of size, so we were trying to keep them off the glass, and also trying to keep the ball out of the paint.
"Whether we’re playing Indiana or anyone else in our league, if you let the ball in the paint a lot, you’re going to struggle. We had times where we struggled. Indiana was getting the ball in there too easy on drives and post ups and their offensive rebounds. We had some struggles. When we kept it out of there, we had a lot more success.”
Purdue hasn't had the luxury of playing with a lead on the road this season. They were way behind early in most of the five losses and even a furious 11-0 run to close out the game and beat Northwestern last Saturday, 61-58
That win took a lot of pressure off, and when they came home and clubbed Iowa by 26 points on Wednesday, it looked like Purdue was ready to get on a roll.
They did. And now they are. That's three straight wins. And even when Indiana rallied midway through the second half to trim the lead to six at 56-50, Purdue never blinked. They simply answered, and then pulled away.
“That’s a great point because we just haven’t been in that position. I think the only time we’ve been in that position was when we played at Ohio, actually having the lead in the second half. That’s a lot of games,'' Painter said. "I thought our guys had poise and continued to execute, continued to play hard and just try to limit them as much as we could.
."Once we started to be able to do that and keep the ball out of the paint there in the second half, we got into a pretty good run.''
Shooting woes have limited Purdue on the road, but they were great on Saturday, making 8-of-16 3-pointers and shooting 48.1 percent from the field. Purdue had a well-balanced attack, with all nine players scoring at least five points and no one scoring more than 12. That was Eric Hunter Jr., who had the 12 and another solid floor game.
The Boilermakers got a big boost from Aaron Wheeler, who made three 3-pointers and finished with 11 points. He made back-to-back 3-pointers to get that late first-half run jump-started, which was encouraging because he had come into the game shooting 18 percent from long distance.
Purdue has now beaten Indiana six times in a row.
