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GOLD AND BLACK ILLUSTRATED VOLUME 25, ISSUE 5 56 ever going to be a day when you're OK with that." More than a year earlier, Purdue had a last-second shot to beat Ohio State at the Big Ten Tournament. The shot missed and the Boiler- makers' season was put out of its misery, but given that team's dy- namics, there was a certain mor- al-victory feel to that result. That Purdue was hit so hard a year later by the Cincinnati loss — and the postgame locker room scene said more than words ever could — speaks to a standard that made a full turn in a short period of time. Normally, cultural changes are not immediate. For the Boilermakers, it was. "As a person you're always try- ing to better yourself and at times you have to re-learn things," Coach Matt Painter said. "What I mean by that in terms of our pro- gram is that we had a really, really good culture where we're winning games and graduating our players, but we had guys who were about Purdue winning and they put that above everything else, even though we had a lot of individual success. "It wasn't intentional, but we got away from that. Without rehashing that, you just try to fix it and move on and be better because of it." An uncommonly mature and highly influential freshman class factored heavily in that transition. But even more relevant were the maturations of upperclassmen Rapheal Davis and Hammons as both players and people. Both im- proved as performers — Davis, from out of nowhere, became the Big Ten Defensive Player-of-the- Year and Ham- mons played to a nearly first- team All-Big Ten level during the conference sea- son — but each made steps else- where as well. For Davis, it was leadership; he immediately emerged as the alpha personality on a team that entered the fall with no seniors among key players and only a pair of upperclassmen on scholarship. For Hammons, his long-awaited pursuit of consistency resulted in him finding it midway through the season and standing as the central figure in Purdue going 12-6 in Big Ten regular-season games after a maddening 8-5 non-conference showing that ended with an eye- sore of a three-game losing streak. The emergence of the two upper- classmen combined with rock-sol- id freshman seasons from forward Vince Edwards, center Isaac Haas and Mathias helped bring Purdue back to relevance, but it was the Boilermakers' sudden reversal of their defensive fortunes that made it possible, as well. After a three-game stretch to close non-conference play in which opponents averaged 88 points per game and shot an astronomi- cal percentage from the field and three-point territory alike, Purdue turned on a dime and the led the Big Ten in field goal percentage defense and three-point percent- age defense. The improvement came after Painter all but scrapped zone, fo- cusing almost entirely on tradi- tional man-to-man defense, and upped the minutes of Davis and point guard Jon Octeus. "I've never been part of a team that changed like that," Painter said. "I don't really know how to describe it." So much of what made Purdue tick last season returns intact, ex- cept for one crucial piece. Octeus "saved" Purdue — that's Painter's term — in his one and only season in the program, pro- viding a badly needed stable and mature presence at the crucial po- sition, not to mention a really good player at both ends of the floor. "What he meant to our pro- gram," Painter said, "it goes be- yond a box score." Without him, point guard is a question, as only sophomore P.J. Thompson returns at the position. He finished the season playing well in a backup role, but it would not seem ideal to cast him now into a 30-minute-a-game sort of role. So Purdue is heavily recruiting immediately eligible fifth-year guards, looking for the next Octe- us, as tall an order as that may be to fill.