The Purdue Boilermakers put together a strong regular season and now will head into the Big Ten tournament as they look to work their way to a higher seed for March Madness. Gone are the days of Zach Edey dominating the post for Purdue.
This season, point guard Braden Smith was the main driving force of the team. Smith was able to help guide Purdue to a 21-10 regular season record. It wasn’t what the team was targeting, but it will be good enough to get them into the NCAA Tournament.
He put together an impressive all-around year and now he has been recognized for the season that he had. With the regular season now in the books, the Big Ten has announced that Smith will be the conference Player of the Year award winner.
In their announcement, they pinpointed some of Smith’s accomplishments from the 2024-25 college basketball season.
– First major conf. player since at least 2002-03 with 15 PPG, 8 APG & 4 RPG – 21 AST shy of breaking own B1G record for total AST in season (292)
– Set Purdue record for career assists on Feb. 28th
– Purdue: 1st school with 3 consecutive B1G POTY awards (Edey ’23, ’24) It doesn’t get much better than that. Smith is well-deserving of the recognition he is receiving.
Throughout the course of the season, Smith ended up playing in 31 games for the Boilermakers. He averaged 16.3 points per game to go along with 8.8 assists, 4.7 rebounds, and 2.3 steals, while shooting 44.5% from the floor and 39.7% from three-point range.
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