7-6!?! Purdue's Zach Edey is getting taller — and better. Where it ends, nobody knows.
Purdue center Zach Edey keeps showing me his middle finger, and it’s not what you think, but how many times in life do you get to write a sentence like that? So much about Edey lends itself to first-time occurrences, starting with his listed height of 7-4, a number that makes him the tallest player in Big Ten history even if it does, technically, undersell his size. Because he’s taller than that. Stick around. Lots of interesting facts, where Zach Edey is concerned.
I’m most fascinated with the middle finger he keeps showing me on our Zoom call, letting me know exactly what he thinks of the way I’m conducting this interv—
Sorry. That’s not what he’s doing at all. Forgive me, if I’m struggling to separate fact from fiction, but Zach Edey can have that effect on you. He gets your mind wandering about the difference between what’s real and what’s impossible, and whether we’ll need to rethink all of that.
The Badgers had few answers for Purdue’s 7-foot-4 freshman center Zach Edey who finished with a career-high 21 points Tuesday.
For Edey, what seems impossible is just how good he is, how far he’s come, in the handful of years since he first started playing basketball. You’ve heard the story by now, how Edey grew up in Canada playing hockey, the world’s largest teenage defenseman, until he reached 6-10 by age 16 and coaches were suggesting he consider basketball. All of that is true, but it doesn’t explain how Edey got so good, so fast, at basketball.
For that, you need to get him talking about baseball.
Zach Edey has gotten taller
“My first instinct was to use these two fingers,” Edey is telling me, holding up the last four fingers on his right hand — all but the thumb — and folding down his forefinger and pinkie. What’s left are the ring finger and middle finger. That’s what he wants me to see.
“I started playing basketball, and these were the two fingers I was using most to shoot,” he’s saying, and he’s shaking his head, because he had it all wrong.
He played baseball as well as hockey. A pitcher, mainly, learning to let the baseball roll off his first two fingers — the pointer, and the middle — so he’d play with the ball at the end of his hand, getting that feel pitchers like.
So there he is, a junior in high school, tallest player on the court, and he can’t shoot at all, and finally a coach stands on a ladder for a closer look and … sorry, doing it again. The part with the ladder didn’t happen. That’s fiction, but the rest is fact. His high school coach in Toronto did notice the basketball was rolling off Edey’s middle two fingers, and he did tell Edey to think of the basketball as a baseball, and to let it roll off his first two fingers instead. Never mind that, in Edey’s enormous hands, a basketball almost does look like a baseball. The tip stuck.
“That translated really quickly,” he says, showing me his first two fingers now. “Soon as I started changing it, my shot was straighter, and with better rotation.”
Six months after picking up the sport, Edey made the Canadian national under-17 team. Soon he was heading to IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., where he couldn’t get onto the court. True story, Zach Edey got more minutes as a college freshman at Purdue — he averaged 8.7 points and 4.4 rebounds and shot 59.7% from the floor in 14.7 minutes per game — than he got as a high school senior. IMG was loaded with Division I players, including 7-foot Duke recruit Mark Williams, and Edey was just this raw kid from Canada still growing into his body, a process complicated by the fact that he was still growing.
Edey was 7-2 when he got to IMG Academy, and 7-3 when he left. In shoes he measured 7-4½, and while the standard procedure at Purdue like most schools is to measure players in shoes and round up, the Boilermakers rounded down on Edey. They listed him last season at 7-4, but he was 7-4½ — which means he was more like 7-5 — and anyway he wasn’t done growing.
By the end of the season, Purdue classmate Jaden Ivey kept referring to Edey in interviews as “7-5.”
Edey doesn’t seem to know his actual height.
“My height goes through weird spurts,” he says. “I was still growing recently. With shoes on, I could be closer to 7-6 by the start of (next) season. I have no idea.”
None of this would matter, if he couldn’t play. But he can, which means Zach Edey’s ceiling is like his actual height. We have no idea.
Didn’t even consider NBA Draft
He’s quirky, this kid. Oh, he comes across as quiet and super-serious, and certainly that’s at the core of who Zach Edey is. But he’s also a kid who likes to smile, and is comfortable with his unique dimensions. He just turned 19, still a teenager, and a few months back he saw a story online about the world’s tallest teenager as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records.
And that kid wasn’t taller than Edey!
So Edey goes to the folks in the Purdue sports information department to see what can be done to fix this issue. He’s laughing about it, and that’s as far as it went, but it’s a glimpse at the kid behind the basketball player.
But he’s mostly serious. For starters, he doesn’t fool around outside the 3-point arc. That’s where the game has gone — Kristaps Porzingis of the Dallas Mavericks has made at least 80 3-pointers in each of his first five NBA seasons, and he’s 7-3 — but Edey is still trying to master the basics of basketball.
“I think there’s always going to be room for a good, solid big man in the middle — Rudy Gobert, people like that,” he says. “You don’t really have to have an outside jump shot to still be dominant, still get paid, still be valued by teams. A jump shot would be super-nice and valued, but I’m not in any rush to get there yet. I know I can, probably.”
With his native Canada in a coronavirus lockdown, Edey is working on his game at Purdue. He gets up hundreds of jumpers around the basket four times a week, lifts weights, does footwork drills. People who’d know say he’s already better than he was just a few months ago, no surprise considering how much Edey improved as the season unfolded.
You know how Edey was shooting those rainbows from the foul line last season? That’s not how he shot them when he arrived at Purdue a few months earlier. He was throwing the ball more on a line until someone suggested more arc. Edey reinvented his foul shot on the fly, then shot 71.4% from the line as a freshman. In his final two regular-season games, against Wisconsin and IU, he averaged 20.5 points and eight rebounds in 19 minutes per game, shooting 16-for-21 from the floor (76.2%).
Edey finished his freshman year as one of just three college players to average eight points and four rebounds, block 30 shots and shoot at least 57.5% from the floor. The others included an All-American (Michigan’s Hunter Dickinson) and the projected No. 2 pick in the 2021 NBA draft (Evan Mobley of Southern California).
Both honors — All-American, NBA draft pick — are in reach for Edey someday, but even as he’s improving so fast, he’s trying to go slowly. The most he’ll tell me, as far as individual goals are concerned, is that “everyone wants to have that personal success. A Big Ten selection would be an honor. I’m just going to work hard on a better me every day.”
He wasn’t going to enter the 2021 NBA draft for the vanity of it, or even for the feedback.
“It would be cool to figure out what they want to see in my game to develop,” Edey says of NBA scouts, “but I think it’s pretty obvious at this point. I need to work on my jump shot, ball-screen defense, ballhandling. I don’t need to do all those (NBA draft) steps for them to tell me the same things coaches here tell me. I feel as if I declared for the draft, it would be a little slight against whatever coaches are telling me here. That can wait.”
He has a level head, this guy. Which is what makes it so surprising, that he kept showing me his middl—
Sorry. Doing it again. I need more practice, separating fact from fiction with Zach Edey, just like he needs more practice on the basketball court. Which will make it more even more difficult, as he improves, to separate fact from fiction. ‘Round and ‘round it goes. Where Zach Edey ends up, nobody knows.
