WATCH: Chinese/Canadian Zach Edey improves his NBA draft stock with dominant performance (40pts) to help get Purdue into Final Four
Zach Edey cements his stock.
Standing 7-foot-3 with a 7-foot-11 wingspan and weighing 300 pounds, Edey will be the biggest player in the NBA next season. There’s still unfinished business in college, though, with Purdue making its first Final Four since 1980. The Purdue senior center could become the second player in college history to win the Wooden Award in back-to-back years, after Ralph Sampson was named college basketball’s most outstanding player twice in the 1980s. But for NBA fans, the question is whether Edey will be any good at the next level.
Slow-footed big men have been phased out of the league in recent years because of their limitations on defense, and maybe that’ll end up being a fatal flaw for Edey. But he’s improved his mobility a lot at Purdue, and he’s an imposing rim protector. Just look at what he did late in the game against Tennessee on Sunday, coming up with a clutch block against potential lottery pick Dalton Knecht.
Edey often doesn’t make strong contests like this because Purdue desperately needs him in position on the other end. They are hopeless without him. He cannot risk falling into foul trouble, either, but his presence alone deters opponents from testing the rim. Playing this way, Purdue had the nation’s 16th-ranked defensive rating, per KenPom, and defensively the team was 11.6 points per 100 possessions better with Edey on the floor than off, per CBB Analytics.
But blocks like the one against Knecht make me wonder whether there’s a chance Edey could follow the trajectory of someone like Brook Lopez, a massive center who began his career as a defensive liability but then transformed into a great defender once he was in the right situation. Lopez is so big and so smart inside that he becomes a high-level player in the right circumstances, as a drop defender when surrounded by lengthy teammates. Edey will in all likelihood be drafted by a team that also tries to put him in the right situation. Otherwise, why take such a specific player? A team will pair him with another big who can defend on the perimeter, as Giannis Antetokounmpo does next to Lopez. Think about pairing him with the Thunder and Chet Holmgren, or with the Heat and Bam Adebayo, or even with the Bucks themselves and Giannis if they want a Lopez apprentice.
Offensively, Edey can’t yet space the floor like Lopez, but he’s a solid free throw shooter, at 70.5 percent in his college career, and has a soft touch on his hook shots. He shoots his 3s well in warm-ups and made one that banked off the glass this season. Perhaps he could tap into a perimeter shot down the line.
But for Purdue, Edey primarily sticks to dunks around the rim. Not just because he’s massive, but because he has the skill to put the ball on the floor for a few dribbles and put a move on a player. He gobbles up rebounds—not even fellow first-round prospect Kel’el Ware stood a chance against him during the Big Ten’s season. He destroys switches on smaller opponents, whether he’s finishing or drawing a foul. Purdue’s Braden Smith has also helped demonstrate Edey’s potential on ball screens, but he could develop into even more of a force with a more spaced-out court and more talented teammates on the perimeter.
After dropping a career-high 40 points on Tennessee, Edey is now averaging 30 points and 16.3 rebounds during Purdue’s tournament run. NC State will challenge him with a beefy interior presence in DJ Burns and a speedy guard in DJ Horne. And if Purdue wins, a loaded UConn team could wait in the final. There’s still more for Edey to prove, but he’s done enough to make himself a first-rounder.
DJ Burns vs. Zach Edey will be awesome.
“One Shining Moment” will feature NC State’s DJ Burns no matter what the 11th seed does against Purdue this Saturday.
Burns plays like he went to the Zach Randolph school of post moves. Watching Sunday’s Duke–NC State game was truly a joy. A fun Synergy stat behind these wild touch shots: In two years with NC State, Burns has made 58.6 percent of his floaters and 49.6 percent of his hook shots. So it’s not like he just got hot against Duke, who disrespected him by not even covering him with a double-team in the second half, when NC State kept feeding Burns over and over and over.
It was a tough loss for Duke, but fans win with this Final Four matchup and a Burns-Edey showdown. Burns is listed at 275 pounds, but he looks like he isn’t giving up any weight to Edey. An earthquake might register when these two colossal big men clash in Arizona.
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