Last season, Purdue lost 7-foot-4 freshman center Daniel Jacobsen two games into the season and never had the rim protector to fill the massive void left by Zach Edey. So, rather than rely simply on Jacobsen’s return in 2025-26, Matt Painter went out and got 6-foot-11 center Oscar Cluff from the Transfer Portal to double down on his interior defense.
Those moves have had the intended effect. After opponents shot nearly 70 percent at the rim last season (per CBBanalytics.com), they’re shooting just 64 percent this year, with a significantly lower percentage of their field goal attempts coming at the rim. However, Painters’ super-sized approach has a trade-off, and it makes Nebraska the Boilermakers’ nightmare matchup.
Purdue’s defensive identity is not built to handle Fred Hoiberg’s style
With Jacobsen, Cluff, and 6-foot-9 Trey Kaufman-Renn playing 66 combined minutes per game, Purdue lives in Painters’ patented drop coverage on pick-and-rolls. That play-style, along with a smaller point guard in Braden Smith, who can have a hard time navigating screens and contesting outside shots, causes Purdue to struggle defending the three-point line.
While the Boilermakers are 27th in KenPom defensive rating, opponents are shooting 32.1 percent from three this season on 26.8 attempts per game, the third-most in the Big Ten. That’s not an elite percentage, but it has been climbing lately, up to 37.6 percent over the last five games, which include three-straight conference losses.
Nebraska is built on shooting the three, but it’s not just the volume that is problematic for Purdue; it’s where those threes come from, not on the court but on the roster. Pryce Sandfort is obviously the team’s most prolific outside shooter, constantly running off an array of screens to get open looks, but 6-foot-10 Rienk Mast and 6-foot-7 Braden Frager both average about five three-point attempts per game.
Rienk Mast’s shooting slump might be over, and in the nick of time
Fred Hoiberg’s five-out play style will stress Purdue’s two-big lineups, pulling Cluff, Jacobsen, and Kaufman-Renn away from the paint, where Nebraska has little interest. Only 40 percent of the Huskers' points come from inside the paint, a 31st percentile rate in the country, and only 11.4 percent come on second-chance opportunities, which Purdue’s size is great at limiting.
That formula, however, only works for Nebraska when its bigs are hitting shots, and for a few games, Mast could not. He missed the first loss of the season, when Nebraska fell to Michigan on January 27, due to an illness, and the effects zapped his legs for the second loss of the year to Illinois on February 1.
A 2-10 performance in the loss to Illinois shed a spotlight on a shooting slump that stretched back to the start of 2026. Since Mast hit six threes against Michigan State on January 2, he has failed to make more than one shot from beyond the arc in a single game. However, Saturday’s 80-68 win over Rutgers may have been the slump-buster Mast needed.
The 6-foot-10 senior scored 26 points on 11-20 from the field and 1-4 from three. He will need to get a few more shots to fall from outside against Purdue, a team that shoots it exceptionally well from three in its own right and has the No. 3-rated offense by KenPom. More than just making shots, his aggressiveness as a scorer will put Cluff and Jacobsen in precarious spots defensively that will play to Nebraska’s advantage.
The Huskers are a lock for the NCAA Tournament. But Hoiberg’s team may need another signature win to stay in the Big Ten title and Final Four conversation. Tuesday night’s matchup with Purdue is the last chance to make that kind of a statement, so Mast is coming back to life at the perfect moment.