When Zach Edey signed his letter of intent to attend Purdue on Wednesday, he was not yet two full years removed from the first basketball game he ever played.
This season the 7-foot-3, 285-pounder will suit up for the national team at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., a prep powerhouse that includes four players in the top 50 of the Class of 2020. Next year he’ll join a Purdue team that has a storied lineage of big men who have been the foundation for one of the Big Ten’s most consistent programs. He’s the No. 358 player in the class according to 247Sports, but he fills a need for the Boilermakers, who badly wanted to add a center to complement the two top-100 guards who already had committed in the class.
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“It seems like a movie sometimes,” says Edey, who committed last Saturday.
But generally, when real-life movies are made about athletes who pick up a sport later in life than most and advance farther than they ever dreamed of, they deal with athletes who simply weren’t exposed to the sport. That wasn’t the case with Edey, who grew up in Toronto. He was just playing other sports, including baseball and, of course, hockey.
“If this kid ever really makes it,” says Vidal Massiah, Edey’s travel ball coach with the Toronto-based Northern Kings, “it’s going to be a truly Canadian story.”
It is also, however, a story about youthful rebellion. There has never been a point when Edey wasn’t extremely tall for his age. He was 6-10 by the time he hit the ninth grade, so there was also never a point when someone wasn’t trying to persuade him to play basketball.
He resisted. “I felt like playing basketball would be pigeon-holing myself,” Edey says. “It’s what every tall person does, so I didn’t want to do it.”
Instead, he played baseball and hockey when he was young, as a pitcher and a defenseman. He played at the AAA level as a baseball player, the highest classification in Canadian amateur sports, and says he could throw 80 mph with a decent curveball. He was a AA level defender in hockey, even as it got to the point that he struggled to find equipment big enough to fit him. He wears size 20 shoes, so finding skates was a challenge.
But in his sophomore year at Leaside High, Edey finally relented on basketball. The father of a close friend of his was coaching a recreational team, and he prodded Edey to start playing right around Christmas that year.
Edey didn’t realize what he’d been missing. “I immediately loved it,” he says. “I came home and said, ‘I want to go back.’ ”
But even then, he didn’t take it as anything he would pursue beyond the recreational level. He considered it good cross training for baseball.
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But that changed on a chance meeting in March 2018. Two of Massiah’s nephews were playing in a tournament Edey was in. Phone numbers were exchanged, but Edey didn’t respond to a text message from Massiah. That’s when Massiah contacted Edey’s mother, Julia.
“At that point, we were like, ‘OK, he’s serious,’ ” Edey says.
Edey agreed to attend a tryout for the Northern Kings and made the squad, and Massiah turned him into his personal project. Edey couldn’t have been more raw.
“I had to learn everything,” he says. “When I first started playing, I didn’t know what a pick-and-roll was. I mean, when I say I didn’t like basketball, I didn’t like it, like, consciously. I tried to stay as far away from it as I could. So I didn’t know anything.”
He did, however, have some skills that could cross over. Many foreign-born players who learn basketball late in their teens struggle with the basics, down to catching the ball. Edey didn’t have that problem, and he picked up other skills quicker than less accomplished athletes.
“Playing hockey, you have to skate, get up and down and have balance,” Massiah says. “He’s got tremendous balance to get up and down the floor. He’s a pitcher. Think of a pitcher’s mind and analytical nature, having to reset your mind after every pitch, and then the touch on the ball. He brought all of those things to the table right away. That jumped off the page.”
Edey still needed development, and Massiah had just the right connection to provide that. He played college basketball at St. Bonaventure when Brian Nash was an assistant coach there, and Nash is now the director of the basketball program at IMG Academy, a school that was built for the purpose of athletic development. Massiah was in contact with Nash even before his work with Edey was underway, and he persuaded the big man to enroll.
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“I was like a blank canvas for people to work on,” Edey says. “And there’s no better place to work on things that IMG.”
IMG put Edey on its second-tier team last season to give him time to develop, even though he was already attracting Division I attention because of his sheer size.
“Last year he had the size,” says IMG national team coach Sean McAloon, “but I don’t think he had the capability to be in our gym on a daily basis. So we put him on the team below ours. He had some good games. he had some games where he was just OK, but I think he’s learned how to understand that, ‘Hey, I have a chance at this thing.’ ”
Over the past year, he got the basics down. He learned how to finish with both hands at the rim, he learned a jump hook and developed a jump shot he could use reliably out to 15 feet and at times beyond the 3-point line. He learned how to move on the pick-and-roll, and he started to get a sense for how to set up on the low block.
“He’s got good feet,” McAloon says. “He runs faster than people give him credit for, because he runs pretty well. He’s got decent hands. Athletically, he can do some things that guys at his size shouldn’t be able to do. Not like above-the-rim athletic, but he can Euro-step a guy, or just small things that you’re like, Wow. He can make the jump hook, up and unders, left and right hand. He’s got good moves and a good little package around the rim.”
The next step, McAloon says, is for Edey to learn how to think the game. He’s a generally intelligent young man, but he has played so few basketball games compared with the rest of his teammates that he is only beginning to understand how to find his rhythm over the course of a game. He doesn’t have a feel for how fast his motor has to run for the entirety of a game, McAloon says, and he doesn’t quite understand positioning on defense and how to make himself a deterrent in the lane.
“He has no idea how to make the game simpler for himself,” McAloon says. “He got better at it last year. He’s open to learn. And just in the last three months, he’s expanding his game. He’s expanding his mind for the game and he’s learning how to apply his body without overexerting himself. It’s been a good growth year.”
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It was good enough for Edey to earn a spot on the national team and to attract the attention of several major Division I programs, including Purdue, Baylor, Tulane, Western Kentucky and Santa Clara.
The Boilermakers were in the market for such a player. After landing guards Jaden Ivey and Ethan Morton in the spring, they focused on getting a big man to close out the class. But they missed out on their top targets Hunter Dickinson of DeMatha Catholic outside Washington, D.C., and Ryan Kalkbrenner of Trinity Catholic High in St. Louis. Taking a big man who is a project wasn’t much of a deterrent because the Boilermakers will still have Matt Haarms and Trevion Williams in the fold unless one of them blows up this season and goes pro.
Edey didn’t know much about U.S. college basketball, but he did know that Purdue has a reputation for developing big men, including Isaac Haas, Caleb Swanigan, A.J. Hammons and JaJuan Johnson within the last decade. That was enough to sell him on going to West Lafayette.
“From my understanding, I knew Purdue and Gonzaga to be the two best schools for big people,” Edey says. “And they showed they really wanted me.”
(Photo courtesy of Zach Edey)
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