Zach Edey a surprise no more as Purdue’s big man, probable national player of the year

Zach Edey was brought to Vidal Massiah’s attention by Massiah’s sister, who saw the then-15-year-old Toronto native at a basketball event in January 2018 and texted her brother with a picture and a concise breakdown: he’s tall, she wrote.

The executive director of Northern Kings, a local AAU program, Massiah hadn’t heard of Edey, then a relative newcomer to basketball after spending his youth focused on baseball and, of course, hockey. But he was almost absurdly large — as a young teenager, approaching 7 feet and still growing — and he was local, and more than worthy of a deeper look.

Two months later, Massiah sat in the bleachers and watched Edey play for the first time. Within minutes, “I was blown away,” Massiah recalled.

“His technique, his soft touch, and he was an athlete,” said Massiah, who played at Saint Bonaventure and went on to captain the Canadian men’s national team. “Once we were done working out, I told his mom, ‘You got an NBA player right here.’ “

Now a 7-foot-4 junior for Purdue, the Big Ten regular season and conference tournament champions and the No. 1 seed in the East Region of the NCAA Tournament, Edey has blossomed into the most dominant big man in college basketball and one of the top players in program history.

Purdue center Zach Edey (15) goes to the basket against Penn State forward Michael Henn (24) during the second half at United Center.

Everyone noticed the height; very few saw the untapped potential that has made Edey a prohibitive favorite for national player of the year.

“Once we got him, the entire community had never seen him or heard of him,” Massiah said. “So I was the butt of some jokes, in terms of, ‘What are you doing with that kid? Do you think this kid has a chance?’

“That was the take on Zach from a lot of people. Which is why I’m so proud of him. It’s an incredible, incredible story of like, totally doubted to totally dominant.”

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Zach Edey goes to America

Edey spent his junior and senior years of high school at powerhouse IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, thanks in part to Massiah’s connection with IMG basketball director Brian Nash, his coach at Saint Bonaventure.

“You don’t normally get kids this size,” said Nash. “We were like, ‘How do we pass on a kid like this?’ You always look at big guys like a piece of clay, and you want to be able to mold them. That was one of (the) things that was intriguing to us.”

While IMG has a national team perennially loaded with Division I recruits and future NBA players — IMG has 20 alumni in the men’s tournament, representing 17 schools — Edey’s first year on campus was with one of the academy’s second-tier rosters. After spending the summer before his senior year back in Toronto, Edey returned to IMG and was given a week to earn a spot on the national squad.

After that week, Nash called Massiah. Not only is he worthy of being on this team, he said, but if Edey elected to come back to IMG for his post-graduate year he could go straight into the NBA draft.

“I think he started having some success and the light went on,” Nash said, “and he goes, ‘OK, guess what? I do love this, I’m having success, I can be really good at it.’ I think he questioned how good he could’ve been early on.”

How many teams recruited Zach Edey?

Despite his size and a successful senior year at IMG — he played 10-12 minutes per game and helped “flip the script,” Nash said, as a backup to North Carolina forward Armando Bacot and former Duke center Mark Williams — Edey received only a handful of scholarship offers.

His finalists were Baylor, Purdue and Santa Clara. Edey also received offers from Minnesota, the first Division I program to extend a scholarship, and Seton Hall.

He was ranked 440th overall, 76th among centers and 34th among Florida prospects in the 2020 class, according to the composite rankings compiled by 247Sports.com.

“I’ll be honest, I tried to sell Zach’s talent and profile to every coach in America and almost nobody bit,” said Massiah. “He was and is someone that was overlooked by everyone. All the experts didn’t see it.”

He was poised to commit to Baylor before the Boilermakers entered the picture. The draw was clear: Purdue has become the most successful major-conference program at evaluating and developing post players. Freshman Will Berg is the fifth 7-footer to play for Purdue and coach Matt Painter since 2016, though none are bigger than Edey, the tallest player in Big Ten history.

Why Purdue was the perfect fit

Signing with Purdue was “the best decision that Zach ever made in his life,” Nash said.

“He went to a system that fit and was going to allow him to be successful. There are very few schools that actually recruit a player like that and know how to use him.”

Under Painter and assistant coach Brandon Brantley, Edey has steadily developed into one of the most productive and impactful big men in recent Division I history at a time when 7-foot-plus players have been nudged into more marginalized roles.

“They are one of the few schools that develop big guys,” said former Xavier and Virginia coach and CBS Sports Network analyst Pete Gillen. “I don’t know how they do it, but they also say, ‘Hey, we’ll work inside-out.’ The big guy is going to get touches. We’re going to prioritize our big guys.”

After scoring 8.7 points across 14.7 minutes per game as a freshman, Edey put up 14.4 points and 7.7 rebounds in starting all but four games as a sophomore.

Playing 31.5 minutes per game this season while battling through double teams and aggressive defenses — the “egregious chucks, grabs, all those things,” as Painter said after a win against Maryland in January — he’s taken his game to another level. Edey is averaging:

“A lot of schools, they forget the inside game, you know what I mean? That’s the modern era. All big guys want to stand on the perimeter and shoot threes, and that’s fine. But Purdue is old-school,” said Gillen of the Boilermakers.

“I think Matt Painter emphasizes, ‘Let’s get the ball to the big dog. Let’s let the big dog eat.’ “

Purdue center Zach Edey (15) shoots the ball while Indiana forward Trayce Jackson-Davis (23) defends in the second half at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall.

Is Zach Edey the national player of the year?

Named last week as the Big Ten Player of the Year, Edey is the overwhelming favorite for the John R. Wooden Award as the nation’s best overall player. He would be the second in program history to win, joining forward Glenn Robinson in 1993-94, and the third player from the Big Ten to do so in the past nine years.

Among the co-finalists for the Wooden Award are Indiana’s Trayce Jackson-Davis, Miami’s Isaiah Wong, Gonzaga’s Drew Timme and Detroit Mercy’s Antoine Davis, the second-leading scorer in NCAA history.

“I think he deserves to be player of the year,” Gillen said. “There are other great players, but in my humble estimation, he deserves it because of his dominance.”

In addition to more traditional statistics, advanced metrics help illustrate Edey’s value and the gap that separates him even from the rest of college basketball’s elite players.

According to SportsReference.com, Edey’s player efficiency rating of 39.96 leads the country and is the second-highest single-season mark since the measurement debuted in 2009. Duke’s Zion Williamson had a rating of 40.84 during the 2018-19 season.

What are Zach Edey’s NBA draft prospects?

But Edey’s dominant season doesn’t guarantee a future in the NBA, which in the past generation has moved away from relying on 7-foot anchors in the paint in favor of a more guard-driven, long-distance style.

While his numbers and impact might paint Edey as a potential lottery pick, he is not seen as an upper-crust prospect and appears only occasionally in NBA mock drafts, and even then among the final picks in the second round.

“The skill set, the touch, the size, the finishing, is all there,” said Rafael Barlowe, the director of scouting for the draft newsletter NBA Big Board. “He’s definitely someone that has teams intrigued.”

The primary concern among talent evaluators is what role Edey plays in the NBA.

“They may be a little divided on him, about how much he can play and how he fits in the modern NBA,” Barlowe said. “He’s done everything that you’d want him to do in terms of dominating his competition. It’s just unfortunate that it doesn’t always translate to today’s NBA.”

More specifically, there are questions whether he has the foot speed and agility to carve out a role similar to the one held by 7-foot-3 Houston Rockets center Boban Marjanović, who has played as a reserve for six teams since entering the league in 2015.

“I think it’s a bit of a shame,” said Massiah. “Obviously, the game has changed. If this is 20 years ago, maybe even 10 … definitely 30 (years ago), he’s the No. 1 pick, right?”

Follow colleges reporter Paul Myerberg on Twitter @PaulMyerberg

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Zach Edey, Purdue’s big man, finally gets attention for more than size