WEST LAFAYETTE — Fletcher Loyer knows what professional basketball road trips entail, the Purdue basketball guard having grown up watching his father, John, live that lifestyle as an NBA assistant.
So when he dismisses any similarity between an NBA West Coast jaunt and the one the Boilermakers make to Washington and Oregon this week, he knows of what he speaks. 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 in its favor recently — do not change for the Pacific time zone.
Purdue coach Matt Painter said the typical attention to fatigue and injury prevention will be addressed. He’s less concerned with his players’ bodies this week than wih their minds. He’s already seen the latter cost his team on the road this season much more than the former.
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The Boilermakers already took one conference road loss at Penn State. It cannot take an abundance of them and keep its head above water in the Big Ten championship race. It cannot afford a blip in concentration on this rare back-to-back road assignment.
“You do everything in terms of travel and preventing injuries, 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. Now being sharp. Now understanding what the game plan is and how we want to go about it — and then just staying connected..”
Other league championship contenders already saw their fortunes change on their lone western excursion.
Michigan won at USC and UCLA — the latter a victory so emphatic it sent Bruins coach Mick Cronin into a postgame tirade against his own team. Iowa posts up in Los Angeles for the same combo this week.
Illinois took a somewhat surprising route to its Pacific Northwest sweep, first clobbering the Ducks 109-77 then sneaking past the Huskies by four four days later. Maryland’s early suggestion it might contend for the conference championship landed with an 0-2 thud out there.
Purdue will handle its single Big Ten West Coast jaunt early. It does so at full strength (at least since Daniel Jacobsen’s early season-ending injury). It also heads out with the momentum of a five-game winning streak — four in conference play, all by 18 or more points.
That 5-0 run coincided with some of the Boilermakers’ best basketball of the year, led by Braden Smith’s excellent lead guard play and a tangible connection between improved ball security and synched-up defense. Sunday’s 104-68 incineration of Nebraska sent the team back on the road on an emphatic note.
Even scouting against these new opponents was made somewhat easier by the fact Purdue faced Washington coach Danny Sprinkle and star forward Great Osobor last season in a second-round NCAA tournament game againt 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 frantic from the former Pac-12 teams’ vantage point. Early signs suggest their travel demands could have a say in the outcome of the conference race.
Oregon won last week at Penn State and Ohio State by a total of three points. So far that counts as a rousing success for eastward trips.
UCLA went into 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. Nope, it walked into a wall in Michigan, losing 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 surprised Illinois with an 82-72 victory in Champaign three days later.
Those four teams will continue to crisscross the country from now through the first week of March. Some of them — though probably not all — will get on a plane again and come to Indianapolis for the 15-team Big Ten tournament a well.
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 airplane models best accommodate sleeping and other factors.
For Purdue, Painter said this week barely strays from their usual attempts to stay on routine. 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 — one departure from normal procedures.
Painter likes to practice in the game venue the day before the game, which is not always possible due to other game or events such as concerts booked there. The Boilermakers will be able to practice at Matthew Knight Arena on Friday, though, before playing the Ducks on Saturday afternoon. If that had not been an option, the team would have shown up a half hour earlier prior to the game to get in extra shooting.
“You just do the best you can,” Painter said. “But you don’t let it be a key factor — even though sometimes it is a key factor. I don’t talk about it that way. I talk about your effort. I just talk 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. Overcome it. Be mentally tougher than that.”
From now on, that’s a coast-to-coast requirement to keep increasing that pile of Big Ten championships.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Purdue basketball preps for Big Ten West Coast trip to Oregon, Washington
