No Edey, no problems?

Purdue’s All-American center, Zach Edey, is returning to the Boilermakers’ lineup for the 2023-2024 season, but he won’t be traveling with Purdue during its four-game, 11-day trip to Europe for a series of exhibitions, as he’ll be playing with the Canadian national team at the FIBA World Cup.

Perhaps for a Purdue team that rode the coattails of its consensus national player of the year a season ago through both very good (seven weeks at No. 1 in the AP Top 25) and very bad (an infamous loss to 16th-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson in the NCAA Tournament), it might not be the worst thing.

Ramping up for Europe. pic.twitter.com/CnT6WgQ4KM

— Purdue Men's Basketball (@BoilerBall) July 28, 2023

The Boilers return over four-fifths of their minutes from the team that was both a No. 1 seed in March Madness and just the second ever to be knocked out by a 16 seed, with the silver lining being that the only other No. 1 seed to lose to a 16 (Virginia in 2018) also happened to win the national championship the very next year, showing it’s indeed possible to bounce back from rock bottom.

Doing that, however, will require coach Matt Painter, his staff and his players to figure out ways to produce on the floor when Edey isn’t there or if he’s otherwise being the center of attention on defense. 

With a quartet of games coming up in an unfamiliar environment, facing teams that include full-grown professionals, the work toward finding out exactly how to do that starts now for Purdue.

Edey coming back unquestionably was a massive win for Purdue, but can Purdue prove that it can rely on others on a consistent basis, if needed?

Here’s a look at the Boilers’ summer tour later this month, which will see Purdue travel to Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. All of the games will be streamed live on FloHoops.

📍: Munich, Germany pic.twitter.com/10cEJZeVpo

— Purdue Men's Basketball (@BoilerBall) August 8, 2023

KICKZ IBAM

IBAM stands for International Basketball Academy Munich, a German youth academy that has produced some talent that’s gone onto play at a high level in college hoops and beyond, such as former Stanford standout and two-time All-Pac 12 Conference selection Oscar da Silva and forward Joshua Obiesie, a Germany national team member who signed as a free agent with the Houston Rockets this week. 

Playing in the U19-level NBBL in Germany, most (if not all) of its current roster likely won’t be identifiable to the average American college basketball fan due to it being a college-aged team that plays its normal games against non-U.S. competition. Still, the track record is there, and it may be a good opportunity for Purdue to begin to find out what works when Edey is unavailable.

BG Hessing Leitershofen

The Kangaroos play in the 2. Basketball Bundesliga – Germany’s second-tier professional hoops league – and have a few players on the roster who have spent some time in college basketball, such as big man Theatloach Pal (an all-conference selection at NCAA Division II Sioux Falls) and guard Nicolas Lagerman, who played NAIA ball at the now-closed Cardinal Stritch University. 

Pal, in particular, was a ferocious presence on the interior a year ago, averaging 17.8 points and 12.2 rebounds per game for his team, while shooting 63.4% from the field, giving Purdue a tough task to stop on the low block without its standout big man.

SKN St. Polten

The six-time Austrian first division champions likely are going to have a new-look roster when Purdue comes to St. Polten to play in the middle of the Boilers’ tour. 

Two of its three leading scorers from a year ago – Iranian guard Philip Jalalpoor (now with Medi Bayreuth in Germany) and veteran/former NBA G-League player Kelvin Lewis (retired, now an assistant coach at Troy) – no longer are with the team, while promising young talent Rashaan Mbemba is off to try out the college game in America this year with Colorado State. 

Michael Holton Jr., the son of the former NBA player/Portland coach of the same name, still is around, though, and he’s bringing along a team-high scoring average from this past season of 22.5 points per game. He’ll try and cause some problems for the Boilers’ backcourt abroad.

BK Brno

The final matchup of the tour with the near century-old club from the second-biggest city in the Czech Republic possibly could see Purdue play a player very familiar to college basketball fans of the past few years. 

That player is forward Cody Riley – who appeared for BK Brno last year, though his current club status is unknown. He spent four seasons at UCLA and started 76 games with the Bruins, helping lead them to the Final Four during the 2020-2021 season. 

Nonetheless, the team should be one of the stronger units on the tour with the names it does have. 

Ex-Western Michigan/Penn State forward Greg Lee has joined in for the 2023-2024 campaign, as has Lithuanian big man Tomas Zdanavicius, who averaged 21 points per game a season ago with Slovakian first-division team Inter Bratislava.