Big Ten Men’s Basketball Media Days

The Big Ten held their men’s basketball media days in Minneapolis this year. Matt Painter’s television interview lasted just about 10 minutes and the questions started off about as you’d expect. Please note I’m paraphrasing from my live tweets at the time of the press conference so these won’t be exact quotes. Yep, that’s right, FDU was brought up. Painter acknowledged that you don’t really ever get over a loss like that and that it will stay with you forever but that’s just part of being competitive. He reiterated what he’s said throughout the offseason, that the team has had multiple losses to double digit seeds but that it isn’t the freshman guards who did that, they’ve only been on the team for a year. He and his staff are the common denominator so it’s on them.

The BTN put up on the screen that Purdue is returning 83.8% of their minutes from last year which is 11th in Division 1. Then, this happened and I absolutely loved it. Maybe it’s because of the injuries that Lewis Jackson came back from during his time at Purdue or maybe it’s because he’s always the shortest dude on the floor but man you gotta love that guy.

Painter just looks like a proud poppa there doesn’t he? You can really see why these guys love to maintain contact with Painter after they are done with their time at Purdue.

After Painter was done the players come on up, this part was not televised so this is largely gathered from highlights found via Twitter as we did not deem it important to send someone this year.

This is the clip that got the internet all riled up. Specifically, IU fans. And I suppose you can see why. It’s easy to not understand an answer fully if you don’t hear the question and the rest of the context of the answer, so IU fans deemed this as a loser mentality, despite the two beautiful rings he showed off, and that they were living rent free in Gillis’ head. Though, as they say, the truth will set you free. Here’s a clip with further context.

Another thing of note also came from Gillis. He said that last year they let the media perception of who they were playing get in the way of who they were actually playing and that might have made a difference. He also indicated that they were planning to change their workload to hopefully have more energy come March.