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Gold and Black Illustrated, Vol 27, Digital 2

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28 GOLD AND BLACK ILLUSTRATED BY BRIAN NEUBERT BNeubert@GoldandBlack.com I t was an afternoon in mid-June, a little more than a week or so after Carsen Edwards had arrived on Purdue's campus for his freshman year. The Boilermakers were practicing that day, conducting one of their sum- mertime full-team practice sessions. Edwards came off a ball screen out beyond the arc, knifed into the lane, elevated and dunked with one hand in the face of one of his new team- mates. That teammate? Isaac Haas, all 7-foot-2, 290 pounds of him. Never mind the fact Edwards fin- ished the dunk. Consider first that he even tried it. This was a 6-foot — and that's a generous listing — freshman in his first days on a Big Ten campus attack- ing the rim in the face of one of the largest basketball players in captivity. Looking back, that moment seems to have been a declaration from Ed- wards, because since then, he's opened eyes and dropped jaws with his play, his cut-throat desire to score and the impact those things might be able to make for Purdue this sea- son, well ahead of the loose schedule coaches might have foreseen for him when they recruited him. "I knew he was good," point guard P.J. Thompson said. "I didn't know he was this good. He's better than I thought and that's a compliment to him, because I already knew he was good." Throughout the summer, the Tex- an impressed all around him with runs of blistering shot-making, ath- letic finishes and mad end-to-end dashes for buckets, displaying a di- mension Purdue would not otherwise have without him. His skill set is one of a kind on Purdue's roster, almost one of a kind under Matt Painter, considering Edwards' combination of explosive shooting, speed, quickness and ath- leticism, combined with uncommon strength for his height, all comple- mented by an aggressiveness that's defined him to those around him. "I feel like those are strengths for me," Edwards said prior to enrolling at Purdue, before he was subject to Painter's summer media restrictions for freshmen. "If the coach lets me do that and gives me the go on that, I'm going to do it. I enjoy being in tran- sition and getting up and down, but I'm still working. Whatever the coach needs me to do, I'm going to do." Edwards got to Purdue and literal- ly played himself out of the plan for which Painter recruited him. This summer, before Purdue went to Spain for its four-game exhibition tour in August, coaches decided to move off their long-held plan to use Edwards at point guard. Instead, he'll play the 2, in order to put him in more positions to score. "The one thing he's so good at is just being an instinctual scorer," Painter said, "and when he does pass the ball well and makes plays that 'INSTANT OFFENSE' Freshman has wowed teammates, coaches this summer

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