Freshman guard CJ Cox, who has cracked a prominent spot in Purdue’s rotation after only months with the program, wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for a strike of luck.
It happened, as it often does, in Las Vegas.
Purdue head coach Matt Painter was there to see recruits from the Indiana All-Stars AAU team compete in a premier tournament in the Nevada desert. And as he watched his targets’ defensive sets in a game against a Massachusetts team, he got distracted.
His guys kept giving up baskets, and all to the same guy – No. 2 on this team from the Boston suburbs. It was Cox.
“He had 26 in the game,” Painter said almost a year-and-a-half later.
One good game wasn’t enough for Painter to recruit Cox, though. The guard was totally off the Power Five radar, ignored by major recruiting rankings. Only when things got more out of the ordinary did the Purdue coach get to thinking.
“Everybody on the team hugged him,” Painter said. “What the hell are we hugging somebody for after an AAU game on July 27?”
Turns out, the game Painter had seen was Cox’s last with his AAU team, a club he’d played with since third grade. And everybody loved him, his AAU coach told Painter later – hence the hugs.
Impressed by all of that, Painter decided to pursue the young East Coast guard. And as he quickly discovered, Cox was the real deal (“Just off the charts substance and off the charts toughness”). And while it was up to chance that Painter watched him, it was no fluke that the Purdue coach noticed him.
Cox averaged nearly 19 points and shot 43% from 3 in the Las Vegas tournament against competition bound for name-brand schools; he’s the kind of player who seems tailor-made for stepping up when needed.
“You don't know who's in the stands, so you got to play hard no matter what,” Cox said his dad and coaches told him through his prep career. “Maybe you'll get that opportunity.”
Already, in Cox’s first game of record for Purdue, he showed the kind of chutzpah Painter saw in Vegas: with Purdue tied at home in an uneven first half against a Southland conference opponent, Cox hit a contested 3 to put his team ahead. He nabbed a steal shortly after to aid a Boilermaker surge.
Before that day in Vegas, Purdue was out of Cox’s league, which was then the Ivy League – he had offers from Yale, Dartmouth and several others. The way things unfolded after that was like a dream, he said. How else could he describe one of the best coaches in the country plucking him from the pile? He committed as soon as Painter offered him.
In his first game in Mackey Arena, an exhibition held last week, he was confronted with one of the payoffs of reaching this level of his sport.
He stood in the tunnel, beckoned by the thundering chants of, “Whose house? Our house,” from the thousands assembled above the court. When he sprinted onto the hardwood, he saw them for the first time: The crowd he described as “crazy,” the huge band.
“A rush of adrenaline,” he said of the moment.
“At first I was a little bit nervous. You know, first time playing in Mackey, but then once I started to get into the flow of things, it kind of went away.”
It's clear already, CJ Cox belonged in a Purdue jersey.
