Boilers Lay Waste to McNeese State After Waking Up

If you see the 109-65 score, you assume Purdue smoked the visiting Cowboys the whole night. Turns out, McNeese actually led a quarter of the way through this game, which in and of itself isn’t anything to be concerned about. But there have been a few slightly unnerving notes to the preseason and Purdue being challenged by McNeese State just wasn’t something we were interested in. Fortunately, Caleb Swanigan, Vincent Edwards and Ivan Drago decided to pummel their opposition from that point forward.

Swanigan wound up with the impressive double-double of 23 points and 20 rebounds while Vincent also had a dub-dub of 19 and 11. Haas added 22 points but somehow only had six boards because Caleb wouldn’t share any more.

PJ Thompson got the start at PG and shot 1/6 from the field. Carsen Edwards had an impressive 18 points off the bench in his first regular season college game, shooting 8/14 from the floor, but only 1/5 from deep and an alarming 1/6 from the free throw line. That needs to get sorted out in a hurry. The Boilers overall shot 71% from the FT line, which I can live with -- Biggie in particular was humming, at 9/11. If you’re going to put him on the line and he can burn you there, too, he’s going to be quite the weapon indeed.

Overall, it was a fine opening night win. Keep in mind that Purdue was without three scholarship players -- Taylor, Smotherman and Cline. Purdue will be cookin’ with Basil, though, on Monday night against Villanova, when the test gets a lot harder.