Two uneasy things:
1. I don't know if I'd describe us having 3 players who played "significant minutes" coming back in addition to Carsen. Haarms and Cline - sure. Not sure I'd label anyone else's as "significant". It's experience, sure, but significant minutes would be 15 min....closer to 20 - when you're looking at replacing 4 starters.
2. Returning Carsen is huge obviously - BUT it's also not a slam dunk. Carsen has had the incredible cast around him in his first two years to develop to the player he is today - i.e. teams haven't been able to focus on him defensively. This year, he comes back after a stellar year - but he faces challenges. Teams WILL throw everything at him and will try to frustrate him and coax him into taking bad shots (something he's dramatically improved on, but still has crept up occasionally). He doesn't have 3 other guys around him shooting 40% from 3, he doesn't have a proven center that can draw double teams, he isn't playing with guys who had played with for 2 years - and the 4 other guys had played together for 4 years.
I'm excited to see how Carsen does this year. He's going to have to mature as a leader and respond to very different challenges than he has had over the past 2 years. He's hit those challenges out of the park and I hope he continues to do so. But in all honesty, the better year we're having as a team, the fewer points per game he is probably scoring himself.
Two good things:
1. As you mentioned, Painter has shown to be able to put together teams. You've rarely seen a Purdue team either stay stagnant or get worse (barring injury) as a season progresses. You haven't seen Painter teams "fall apart" in conference play. They almost always trend in the right direction. I think this year is somewhat unique to that in he doesn't have a lot of experience - we're used to seeing players develop for four years and this is going to be a team really starting from scratch as a "unit". But if there's one coach that can develop a team, it's Painter.
2. On a similar note, his ability to coach, specifically defensively, will be big this year. We've seen Purdue teams go from "what the" defensively to great by the heart of conference play. This team has a lot of the pieces to be a great defensive puzzle for teams. If we have a solid defense by New Year's, I think we'll be in a pretty good spot. If it's until end of January, it will depend if we've been able to avoid bad losses to see the position we're in.