Friday’s addition of Trey Kaufman to Purdue’s 2021 signing class was one of the biggest and most improbable recruiting victories for Matt Painter since he returned to his alma mater more than a decade-and-a-half ago.
It wasn’t just that Purdue signed another top-50 national recruit over a list of national champions and bluebloods, but that it did so from a part of Indiana where Purdue recruiting ambitions typically curl up and die very quickly, to the point it’s normally not even worth the stamps for the recruiting letters. In the context of advantage, this was an in-state recruit by technicality only. Might as well have been a different-planet recruit, actually.
Nine times out of 10, a player as highly regarded and recruited as Kaufman was from the outskirts of Louisville and the home base of IU is going to go to one of those two schools provided they squeeze him.
Both those schools squeezed Kaufman.
Louisville was a non-starter for whatever reason and didn’t even make his final list.
Indiana, as we’ve told you for literally months, he just wasn’t that into them.
Hey, that happens. Very similar to Robert Phinisee a few years ago. He never really was all that into Purdue, but had Indiana passed on him, he’d have probably come to Purdue because it was convenient and an easy choice to make.
In the middle of a pandemic that narrowed the scope of a lot of recruitments, Kaufman probably would have gone to Indiana if not Purdue, because alternatives were deep-sixed by distance and dead periods.
But it was Purdue, as it was really from the outset of this recruitment, them and Xavier, before X fell off. Purdue landing Caleb Furst, um, first was something that had to be ironed out over time, but things did evolve.
If you saw Kaufman play this summer, you saw a player who had as productive a pandemic as is possible. He’s bigger, stronger, faster, quicker and more explosive than he was last we’d seen him.
He is legitimately a player now who can play all over a frontcourt, all three positions. But his development this summer showed a player who can play on the wing, as well as the power forward spot, alongside Furst, the two of whom there’s no doubt in my mind — having seen both of them play many times over several years — can complement one another very well.
Purdue’s done this before. Caleb Swanigan and Vincent Edwards helped the Boilermakers win a hell of a lot of games a few years back. Now, were those lineups perfect? No. But they also provided Purdue some real advantages and, again, won a hell of a lot of games.
Kaufman and Furst — and that’s the story here today as much as anything, Purdue finalizing a tremendous frontcourt and not just getting two tremendous prospects in silos — can be really good together and provide the Boilermakers a talented, skilled, versatile, interchangeable and modern frontcourt that should be a foundation of this really formidable roster Painter is building.
I don’t think there’s any question Furst’s best matchups will lie at the 5 and Kaufman’s probably at the 4, but when Furst is the 4 and Kaufman the 3, you will also have a lineup that could terrorize the offensive glass, stretch the floor from four positions and just really impact the game with size. Kaufman may not have Vincent Edwards’ guard skills offensively, but he will be bigger than Edwards ever was and just as quick and mobile, in my opinion.
Both can play facing the basket or with their backs to it, both can make jumpers and both can pass, and so high-low action could be a bedrock for this offense moving forward.
Landing Kaufman was huge for Purdue, because he’s really good and trending upward, and with him and Furst it’s another step toward building another really skilled offensive team, similar to the ones the Boilermakers just won so many games with.
Why did Purdue resonate so strongly with Kaufman all along, to the point where it won out decidedly over regional name brands and despite there being a period of time where I’m not even certain he had a live Purdue offer?
Because everything Purdue is good with in recruiting, and everything recruits so often say but don’t mean, those things were the formula for Kaufman. A coherent basketball plan, for one thing. A track record with versatile frontcourt players for another. A strong relationship with the head coach, where Purdue had a significant advantage. Good academics and proximity to home, too.
Kaufman never seemed to go for the celebrity, BMOC stuff in recruiting, and that’s where Indiana and Louisville and such often hook kids, and I don’t think he was into the games some coaches play in recruiting. Purdue’s very different in that way, and its more understated identity, I think, really came off as the perfect fit to Kaufman, and probably Furst, too.
That’s part of where Purdue is set up really nicely here.
Kaufman and Furst are really good players, but also rock-solid people insofar as I can know … smart, unselfish and just nice, but also competitive, young people.
With the addition of both players, Purdue will have gotten better, much better, in more ways than one.
