Matt Painter built Purdue's Final Four roster the old-school way ... and it works

Lance Jones will be a central figure for the Boilermakers when they take on NC State in the national semifinals on Saturday night.

But the senior is Purdue’s only transfer, making Matt Painter’s roster — the Boilermakers’ other 12 scholarship players were recruited out of high school — an anomaly in the open-transfer era of modern college basketball.

It’s certainly an outlier in Phoenix for the Final Four this weekend, where UConn, Alabama and NC State have used the portal to build their rosters. In fact, 13 of the 20 starters on the 4 teams are transfers — and many of them are stars.

Take Kevin Keatts’ N.C. State squad, for example, which is composed of a bunch of first-year imports, like DJ Horne (Arizona State, though he’s from Raleigh, NC), Mohamed Diarra (Missouri), Jayden Taylor (Butler), Michael O’Connell (Stanford) and Ben Middlebrooks (Clemson), plus big man DJ Burns Jr., who arrived from Winthrop 2 years ago.

Top-seed Purdue will face 11th-seed NC State (a 9.5-point underdog via ESPN BET) in a contrast of styles and roster-building approaches.

Phoenix provides proof that differing approaches can have success. One could build a compelling argument that NC State’s late-season surge, in which the Wolfpack are riding a 9-game winning streak to win the automatic ACC bid in the conference tourney, then the first 4 games of the NCAA Tournament, is because it took months for Keatts’ newly pieced together lineup to fully gel.

The Boilermakers are built in a more old-school fashion, as Painter has continued to recruit high schools hard, figuring he can develop them and — perhaps most importantly these days — keep them in West Lafayette until they’re upperclassmen. It’s worked for Painter the past 20 years, since he snagged the recruiting class of Robbie Hummel, E’Twaun Moore and JaJuan Johnson in 2007, a group of “Baby Boilers” that elevated Purdue’s profile back then.

“Now, it’s a little different when someone takes a job, they jump into the portal and the people that they get might be with them for 3 years, but really are going to be with them for 2 and a lot of them will be with them for 1,” Painter said Thursday in Phoenix during his pre-Final Four media availability. “You can have a good season with that, but sometimes you can’t have growth with that.

“The way we’ve been able to do it at Purdue now is just like we did it then. We’re trying to sign high school guys and develop them and grow with them. Now, at some point, I think (departures and the portal) comes to find us also. Going into this next year, we’ll have 2 transfers in 4 years, that’s the fewest amount of any high-major in the country by a long shot. … We want to continue to do what we’ve done and we’ve seen be successful for us.”

It’s a hard line to follow. After Purdue’s loss in the 1st round last season to FDU, Painter knew the Boilermakers needed to get quicker, more athletic and better defensively, and it had to do so with a mature, veteran player, not a rookie. Jones, who had been a stellar defender and decent scorer during his time at Southern Illinois, seemed the best option, if only to give the Boilermakers minutes off the bench this season.

Turns out, he was much more than that, a starter who helped to transform Purdue into more of what Painter had envisioned, because Jones’ quickness, ball-handling and shot-making helped take pressure off rising sophomore guards Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer.

Jones was the perfect player at the perfect moment, fitting in — from a culture and personality point of view — with those who had been around longer. That includes seniors Zach Edey (the No. 436th-ranked player in his 2020 class) and Mason Gillis (No. 203, per 247 Sports, in ’19), and sophomores Trey Kaufman-Renn (No. 50 in ’21), Smith (216 in ’22), Loyer (122 in ’22), among others.

Fitting, then, that Jones hit the key 3-pointer to stretch Purdue’s 3-point lead to 6 late in their Elite 8 win over Tennessee.

In an era now where players can transfer without penalty — previous to open transfers, they’d have to sit out a season, unless they had graduated from their previous institution — keeping everyone engaged can be a challenge. Even now for Purdue, Painter has 2 players in Ethan Morton and Caleb Furst who have combined to start more than 60 games for the Boilermakers but have not even been in the rotation during the NCAA Tournament. And freshman Myles Colvin, the No. 63 player overall in the Class of ’23, plays less than 9 minutes per game as he waits his time.

But Painter has made it work, at least for this season. Purdue has 6 incoming freshmen next season, with the roster — right now — oversigned by 1, so Painter will have to work out the numbers in the offseason. And, as he points out, there will come a time that Purdue is stung by an unexpected transfer (or more), leaving the staff to recruit more significantly in the transfer portal.

Old-school, however, is working right now, perhaps enough to give the Boilermakers a national championship.