Purdue basketball prepares for Big Ten West Coast trip to Oregon, Washington

On By Littum

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  • Purdue at Washington, 9:30 p.m., Wednesday; TV: BTN

WEST LAFAYETTE — Fletcher Loyer knows what professional basketball road trips entail Purdue basketball guard who grew up watching his father, John, live that lifestyle as an NBA assistant.

So when he dismisses any similarity between an NBA West Coast trip and the one the Boilermakers are making to Washington and Oregon this week, he knows what he’s talking about. The team will adjust to the three-hour time change just as it did to win the Rady Children’s Invitational in San Diego earlier this season.

The intangibles necessary to win on the road — factors Purdue turned more to its advantage recently — don’t change for the Pacific time zone.

Purdue coach Matt Painter said the typical attention to fatigue and injury prevention will be addressed. He is less concerned about his players’ bodies this week than their minds. He has already seen the latter cost his team away from home this season far more than the former.

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The Boilermakers already took a conference road loss at Penn State. It can’t take an abundance of them and stay afloat in the Big Ten championship race. It can’t afford a concentration in this rare back-to-back road assignment.

“You do everything in terms of travel and injury prevention and you do everything in your power to help the players be ready to go,” Painter said. “But the mental is more important than the physical. Being sharp now. Understanding now what the game plan is and how we’re going to go about it – and then just staying connected..”

Other league championship contenders already saw their fortunes change on their lone western outing.

Michigan won at USC and UCLA — the latter a victory so emphatic that it sent Bruins coach Mick Cronin into a postgame tirade against his own team. Iowa lines up in Los Angeles for the same combination this week.

Illinois took a somewhat surprising route to its Pacific Northwest sweep, first gutting the Ducks 109-77 and then sneaking past the Huskies four four days later. Maryland’s early suggestion that it could contend for the conference championship landed with an 0-2 dunk out there.

Purdue will make its lone Big Ten West Coast outing early. It does so at full strength (at least since Daniel Jacobsen’s early season-ending injury). It’s also riding the momentum of a five-game winning streak — four in conference play, all by 18 or more points.

The 5-0 run coincided with some of the Boilermakers’ best basketball of the year, led by Braden Smith’s outstanding lead guard play and a tangible connection between improved ball security and synchronized defense. Sunday’s 104-68 burnout of Nebraska sent the team back on the road with an emphatic note.

Even scouting against these new opponents was made somewhat easier by the fact that Purdue faced Washington coach Danny Sprinkle and star forward Great Osobor last season in a second-round NCAA tournament game against Urah State. Painter and his staff will have two days to prepare for the Ducks, and 35 years of coach Dana Altman’s system to analyze.

The situation looks much more hectic from the former Pac-12 teams’ vantage point. Early signs suggest their travel requirements could have an impact on the outcome of the conference race.

Oregon won last week at Penn State and Ohio State by a combined three points. So far it counts as a great success for trips to the east.

UCLA entered the new year looking like a potential league favorite. The Bruins are now 0-3 heading East in conference play, losing to Nebraska, Maryland and Rutgers by at least seven points in each game.

Washington seemed to turn a competitive corner around the end of December. No, it went into a wall in Michigan and lost to that state’s two title contenders by a combined 50 points. USC appeared headed for a similar fate after an uninspiring loss at Indiana, but it stunned Illinois with an 82-72 victory in Champaign three days later.

These four teams will continue to criss-cross the country from now until the first week of March. Some of them — though probably not all — will get back on a plane and come to Indianapolis for the 15-team Big Ten tournament.

At Big Ten media day in October, Cronin and Altman said they put a lot of preseason thought into travel procedures. That included conversations with NBA teams about best practices — down to which aircraft models best accommodate sleep and other factors.

For Purdue, Painter said this week barely deviates from their usual attempts to stay on track. The team left early Tuesday and practiced in Seattle that afternoon. The team will remain in Seattle overnight after Wednesday’s game and fly to Eugene the next morning — a departure from normal procedures.

The painter likes to practice in the venue the day before the game, which is not always possible due to other games or events such as concerts booked there. However, the Boilermakers will be able to practice at Matthew Knight Arena on Friday before playing the Ducks on Saturday afternoon. If that had not been an option, the team would have arrived half an hour earlier before the game to get extra shooting.

“You just do the best you can,” Painter said. “But you don’t let that be a key factor – even though sometimes it is is a key factor. I don’t talk about it that way. I’m talking about your efforts. I’m just talking about going into it with a clear mind and understanding things.

“I don’t sit there and say, ‘Well, you know we traveled, so it’s okay if we lose.’ No, it’s not okay if we lose. Be mentally tougher than that.

From now on, it’s a coast-to-coast requirement to keep adding to the pile of Big Ten championships.