Sam King will return to the Boilermakers for his final season in 2026-2027 after taking the rather unusual step for a walk-on of redshirting. That\u2019s right during the 2025-2026 season Sam King officially redshirted meaning that he has one year of eligibility remaining. Painter and staff clearly think highly of this young man to offer him the chance to redshirt and remain on the team. You have to think this is a pretty strong signal that he\u2019s a helpful guy in practice and brings a good attitude. That\u2019s exactly what you want from the guy\u2019s you choose to take on as walk-ons. Of course King has a very strong Purdue connection but he\u2019s a good player in his own right and should be taken seriously based on his merits.<\/p>\n
While he\u2019s not seen a ton of action in his Purdue career, appearing in just 16 games over his three non-redshirt years, that\u2019s not what it\u2019s about for a guy like King. He came to Purdue from Columbus North where he averaged 15 and 6 as a senior. It\u2019s not that he couldn\u2019t have gone elsewhere to play basketball, he had multiple Division III offers and also preferred walk-on spots at Northwestern and Purdue Fort Wayne but it was that Purdue was where he wanted to be. He seems a bright enough kid to know how difficult it would be to break through into serious minutes as a Boilermaker. We just saw Aaron Fine head off to Ball State to try and get minutes and I\u2019m sure if King wanted to head elsewhere he\u2019d be able to find a place. Instead, he stuck around and was able to redshirt and will play one final season at Purdue. Will it be a Bobby Buckets or Grady Eifert like final season? That seems unlikely, instead what it is most likely to be is a season of grinding it out in practice, preparing the team for the next game, and doing everything he can off the court to prepare himself for like after basketball. He\u2019s a management major, but it wouldn\u2019t surprise me if he sticks around as a graduate assistant or some other role in the future.<\/p>\n
So, what do I want from Sam King next season? Keep grinding in practice, represent Purdue with pride, and graduate with a great degree. I have no doubt he will accomplish all three with ease.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam King will return to the Boilermakers for his final season in 2026-2027 after taking the rather unusual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,311262,85],"class_list":["post-642907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-purdue-mens-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}