Gritty, Ugly, and Beautiful: Braden Smith Leads Purdue Past USC on One Good Leg
If you looked strictly at the box score from Purdue’s trip to the Galen Center on Saturday night, you’d see a fairly standard Braden Smith stat line: 22 points, some clutch free throws, and a team that remains undefeated in Big Ten play. But spreadsheets don’t limp. They don’t wince when they change direction, and they certainly don’t panic when the team’s leader goes down two minutes into the game.
Saturday night in Los Angeles wasn’t just another win for the fifth-ranked Purdue Boilermakers; it was a testament to grit, a little bit of luck, and the stubborn refusal of a senior guard to let a stiff knee ruin a perfect conference record.
The Moment the Air Left the Building
The game was barely old enough to need a diaper change when disaster struck. Two minutes in. That’s it. Smith was driving to the basket, doing what he does, when he knocked knees with USC’s Ryan Cornish. You could almost feel the collective intake of breath from West Lafayette all the way to the California coast.
Smith tried to tough it out immediately, because of course he did. But by the 16:16 mark, he had to limp off. For a few terrifying minutes, the Boilers looked lost. Without their general, they fell into a hole that seemed to get deeper by the second. At one point, USC was up 22-8, and the Purdue Boilermakers looked less like a top-five team and more like a group of guys who’d just met at the YMCA.
“I don’t think it’s good,” Smith admitted after the game, regarding the knee. But in the heat of the moment? “I knew I’d be back. I just needed a minute to try to walk it off.”
And walk it off he did—sort of.
The First Half Revival
When Smith checked back in, he didn’t just return; he went nuclear. Despite playing on what was essentially one functional leg, he sparked a 30-10 run that flipped the script entirely. It was one of those “put the team on my back” moments that sports writers love to wax poetic about. He poured in 18 points in the first half alone.
Jack Benter deserves a nod here, too. The guy was everywhere—taking charges, hitting a game-tying three, and grabbing a putback that seemed to wake the entire team up. But it was Smith, grimacing through the pain, who dragged Purdue into the locker room with a 38-32 halftime lead.
A Second Half Slog
Here is where the “human” element really kicked in. Adrenaline is a heck of a drug, but it wears off. As the second half dragged on, Smith’s knee stiffened up. You could see it. The burst wasn’t quite there. The lift on the jump shot was gone.
“My leg was so stiff, and it gave out on me a couple of times,” Smith said later. “It was just hard to push off my legs on my jump shot and really move.”
His production dipped, naturally. But great players don’t need to be great for 40 minutes; they just need to be great for the right seconds.
With the game hanging in the balance and the score tight (65-62), Smith—stiff leg and all—managed to swipe a steal with 26 seconds left and convert a layup. It was ugly, it was desperate, and it was absolutely beautiful. He followed it up by icing the game at the free-throw line with 13 seconds remaining.
Purdue 69, USC 64.
The Cost of Victory
Coach Matt Painter put it simply: “He’s a tough guy. The fact that he played 37 minutes kind of showed that.”
There’s no rest for the weary, though. Smith expects the knee to bother him for a week or two, which isn’t ideal with UCLA looming on Tuesday. But this is Big Ten basketball. It’s not about feeling fresh; it’s about surviving the grind.
Oscar Cluff also deserves a mention for his yeoman’s work—19 points and six boards, plus some surprisingly deft passing—but the narrative of this game begins and ends with Smith’s knee.
It wasn’t pretty. At times, it was downright scary. But Purdue survived a scare in LA, proving that they can take a punch (or a knee) and keep swinging. If this is the kind of heart they’re bringing to the rest of the conference schedule, the rest of the Big Ten should be very, very worried. Even if their point guard needs an ice bath the size of a swimming pool.
