GLENDALE, Ariz. — During a quiet beat of the national anthem before Purdue played at Illinois on March 5, someone in the crowd shouted loud enough for everyone to hear: “F— Zach Edey!” Assistant Boilermakers Brandon Brantley and Director of Operations Elliot Bloom looked at each other and said, “Thank you. They knew what was going to happen. A poked bear then mauled the Illini: 28 points, eight rebounds, three assists, two blocks and a steal in a 77-71 road victory over the second-best team in the Big Ten.
“When he was younger, I told him, ‘Oh, that big guy, he’s my favorite in the league.’ He’s the best in the league,” Brantley said. “He was looking at me like, What? I was like, ‘Hey, there’s a package in my office. (Central Maryland) Julian Reese sent you roses. It’s harder now, because he knows how good he is.
There simply aren’t many big men left who could be considered a legitimate threat to Edey, the 7-foot-4, 300-pound two-time national player of the year. There were supposed to be two here at the Final Four, but Edey crushed the first one — NC State’s dancing bear DJ Burns Jr. — in the semifinals Saturday night. Fittingly, the latest boss is America’s second-best center: Connecticut’s Donovan Clingan, at 7-foot-2, 280 pounds.
Monday night, it’s Big Maple vs. Cling Kong for a national championship.
“It’s going to be fun to watch,” Purdue guard Fletcher Loyer said Sunday, in part because the two gentle giants find their inner maniac when their supremacy is challenged. “Zach likes it. You saw him the other day with DJ Burns. The media hyped him up – rightly so, he’s a great player, same for Clingan. This is no disrespect to any of them. That’s how hard Zach has worked, how determined he is to win a national championship. You can kind of see it in his eyes. We see that sometimes before matches.
“He has a dead look. If I’m on the other team, I don’t want to see that from him, because obviously, back-to-back national player of the year, he’ll get the job done.
“When you see the people who have done it before you… It’s really amazing.” 🙌@TheAndyKatz I spoke with Zach Edey about being the first back-to-back @NaismithTrophy Player of the year since 1983 🎙️ pic.twitter.com/keqwP2GmaX
– NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) April 7, 2024
But Clingan will have something to say about that. After spending last season supporting star center Adama Sanogo and much of this season dealing with foot injuries, Clingan is finally healthy and fully committed. During the Big East tournament, coach Dan Hurley called him the “Jolly Green Giant” and said the Huskies needed him to be more like another famous tall green guy: Hulk.
“He’s got to get that level of intensity, get that nastiness,” Hurley said then. “He’s a really lovely guy (but) when Donovan brings it out, he impacts the game like few players in the country.”
Narrator: He did it for this NCAA tournament.
Clingan was a dominant force throughout UConn’s run to a second straight national championship game. He almost single-handedly destroyed Illinois in the Elite Eight – poor Illini, still playing the role of a helpless skyscraper reduced to rubble by a juggernaut – and when he decided to smash the Hulk against the Alabama late in the semifinals Saturday, the game was over. .
“Realizing what’s at stake, that every team is going to do their best, bring everything they’ve got, you just have to play more physical, play meaner, try to be a force,” Clingan said. With Edey next – this is the first time Clingan remembers facing a player bigger than him – there will be no problem flipping the switch again. “You realize the matchup you’re in, you realize what’s in front of you, and it just makes you want to go even harder. It makes you want to play even better.
What this NCAA tournament lacked in buzzers, it more than made up for with these two aircraft carrier-sized buzzsaws.
And in the process, even though seemingly everything else changes in modern college basketball, their play reaffirmed the importance of return players to the basket.
“People tried to ignore it and act like it wasn’t important for a while,” Edey said. “But being able to rebound, being able to protect the paint, being able to score inside, having that post presence is a big thing in basketball. I think you kind of saw that in this tournament.
Edey, obviously, has been Purdue’s North Star all season, practically sleepwalking into nightly double-doubles. There’s a reason he’s the first player since Ralph Sampson in the early 1980s — fittingly, another 7-foot-4 unicorn — to win back-to-back Wooden Awards. In the Boilermakers’ 13-point Final Four win over NC State, Edey had a team-high 20 points, 12 rebounds, four assists and two blocks…and a day later he rated that outing as if he had posted a goose egg. : “I didn’t have my best match.” For analytics buffs, Edey was named KenPom’s game MVP in 29 of Purdue’s 38 contests this season, including all five in the Big Dance. Yawn.
“He’s a different animal,” Hurley said of Edey, despite the countless other quality centers the Huskies have seen this season. “You can coach or play your entire career and never coach or play against someone of his stature.”
UConn sophomore Donovan Clingan talks about Purdue’s Zach Edey pic.twitter.com/E1gOd1gHSc
–Gavin Keefe (@GavinKeefe) April 7, 2024
That’s why, despite the NBA’s move away from paint patrol centers, Edey is still expected to be a first-round pick in this summer’s NBA draft.
The same goes for Clingan, whose domination takes a different form but is no less stifling. If Edey’s most elite skill is his hook heroics, then Clingan’s is his defensive prowess, the way he uses his 7-foot-7 wingspan to form a force field around the hoop. Clingan hasn’t played a single 30-minute game in this NCAA Tournament — and doesn’t he need one, given UConn’s 25-point average margin of victory — but in the last four Huskies games? He had an incredible 18 blocks, including four against Alabama’s No. 1 offense in the Final Four. All of this is to say that in the NCAA tournament, Cling Kong, in particular, evolved into the final boss version of himself. According to CBB Analytics, since the start of the Big Dance, Clingan has averaged a team-high 16.2 points, 9 rebounds, 3.6 blocks and 1.8 assists per game, despite not playing only 24.4 minutes per night.
“He really is,” Purdue’s Trey Kaufman-Renn said, “the kind of engine that makes UConn run.”
Basketball, of course, remains a team game, although everyone crowding State Farm Stadium on Monday night would probably be just as happy to see Edey and Clingan face off in a one-on-one game . Still: Along with each team’s backcourt stars — All-America guard Tristen Newton for UConn and All-Big Ten guard Braden Smith for Purdue — Edey and Clingan are the suns around which everyone revolves.
You can’t reasonably hope to stop either of them…but you have to at least slow them down a little to have a chance of cutting down the nets.
Painter, a coach as advanced and sophisticated as any in the country, didn’t always play that way. In 2019 — when he came close on a miracle pass from Kihei Clark and the Mamadi Diakite floater from his first Final Four — his Boilermakers instead played through guard Carsen Edwards, a scintillating scorer and two-time All -American.
And it can work. It made. But despite the guard play wins in March, Painter realized he also needed muscle to get Purdue back to a place it hadn’t been since 1980.
“We looked across the earth to determine its size,” Painter said. “We’re trying to go out there and get it because it’s proven, if you can work with it.”
And Purdue did, building its entire offense around the Big Maple; Edey is now the first national scorer to reach the Final Four since Oscar Robertson in 1960, confirming Painter’s philosophy.
It’s no different with Hurley and the way he liked Clingan. As valuable as Cam Spencer has been out of the transfer portal, as critical as Stephon Castle’s emergence has been the second half of this season, it’s Clingan’s versatility that allows these other Huskies to show the best in them -themselves. “Maybe our most influential player,” Hurley said, validating what the metrics already indicate. Clingan has the highest on-off differential on UConn’s roster, according to CBB Analytics; the Huskies score 20.1 more points per 100 possessions with him on the floor… while also allowing 15.3 fewer points per 100 possessions.
So just your average daily differential caliber of 35.4 points.
It’s no surprise that the hype around this matchup is almost as high as the sight lines of these two centers.
Print your fighting style posters, create your monster movie graphics. Everything is justified.
“It’s going to be a great matchup,” Purdue’s Mason Gillis said. “The best win.”
(Top photo: Bob Donnan and Richard Deutsch / USA Today)