Rutgers Hands No. 1 Purdue Basketball First Loss of the Season
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — For the second straight season, Rutgers knocks off No. 1 Purdue basketball on a late 3-pointer. This time, the Scarlet Knights walked into Mackey Arena and escaped a furious second-half comeback by the Boilermakers to win 65-64 on Monday night.
"They're a tough team and they fight," Purdue coach Matt Painter said. "They make it tough for you to throw it inside, they make it tough for you to catch the ball, but it's not impossible. We just had to show more resolve. At the end of the day, I just thought that Rutgers was mentally and physically tougher than we were, even if we would have won the game."
Junior center Zach Edey scored a game-high 19 points on 6-of-10 shooting while also pulling in 11 rebounds, and junior guard Brandon Newman knocked down a trio of 3-pointers to finish with 11 points off the bench.
Purdue trailed by as many as 13 points, but the team chipped away at the deficit at had a chance to put the game away in the final moments. However, a 3-pointer by Rutgers senior guard Cam Spencer ended up being the deciding basket.
Senior guard Paul Mulcahy led the Scarlet Knights with 16 points, eight rebounds and six assists, including the pass that set up Spencer’s late-game shot attempt.
“Credit to my teammates, and coach drew up a great play,” said Spencer who scored 14 points. “With how they played it, we kind of had to go to something else. But Paul was able to get into the lane and find me, and luckily the shot went in.”
Rutgers brought a stifling defensive intensity to West Lafayette, holding Purdue to 6-of-25 from the field in the opening half. The Scarlet Knights weren’t much better to start the game, but they received a boost from junior center Clifford Omoruyi on the offensive end of the court.
Omoruyi recorded 11 of his 12 points before halftime, including a wide-open 3-pointer from the top of the key. And for the first time all season, Edey struggled to answer back as he dealt with foul trouble.
Edey scored just four points in the first half, making one shot from the field. The Scarlet Knights took advantage with a 10-0 run to take a seven-point lead with 5:09 left to play before the break. During the stretch, the Boilermakers turned the ball over five times in four minutes.
“I have to stay out of foul trouble in the first," Edey said. "Obviously, I picked up a quick early one. The second I picked up pretty quickly, too. I have to be able to play more minutes in games like these. I can't bench myself with foul trouble, it's something I can't do."
However, Purdue kept the game from getting out of hand by knocking down 10 free throws in the first half and finished 19-of-28 from the line. The team made just one shot from the floor in the final nine minutes before halftime, and Rutgers went into the locker room with a 34-24 lead.
"It was those empty possessions when we had some perimeter shots in the first half that I just thought was us in terms of taking tough perimeter shots,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. "We've gotta be able to have some discipline and probe the defense more when things aren't there and move the ball a little bit more."
The Boilermakers put together a strong push in the second half that was kickstarted by a 10-1 run. Freshman guard Fletcher Loyer scored five straight points after going scoreless in the first half. He recorded 10 points and knocked down a pair of 3-pointers.
Purdue found its first lead in the second half with 4:45 left to play as Newman buried a 3-pointer. But Mulcahy was responsible for nine of the last 13 points for Rutgers. He registered a season-high scoring output and grabbed three offensive rebounds down the stretch.
“I mean, we just kept letting him get the ball back,” Newman said. "We kept letting him get second cracks at it. We were supposed to whip him coming off those [dribble handoffs]. We were able to make him miss a couple times, but he ended up getting the ball back and putting it in."
With three seconds remaining in the game, Newman had an open look from beyond the arc that didn’t find the bottom of the net. Purdue never had a second chance to get a shot off, and the team fell to 13-1 and 2-1 in Big Ten play.
"We got the shot we wanted, it just didn't go in," Edey said. "I felt like we had pretty good ball movement. I'll live with that shot every single time at the end of the game. It just didn't go in this time."
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D.J. Fezler is a staff writer for BoilermakersCountry.com. Hailing from The Region, he is from Cedar Lake in Northwest Indiana and has spent the last two years covering Purdue football and basketball.