Ed DeChellis may not have any WMD's, but he's still got a secret weapon or two. He unleashed them both on Purdue last night.

The press and trap -- two high-risk, high-reward defenses, seemed to catch the Boilermakers off-guard last night in the Bryce Jordan Center.

The Penn State men's basketball team forced 19 turnovers, helping the team secure its biggest conference blowout win since the 2001 season.

"There's no doubt we struggled a little bit against the press," Purdue coach Matt Painter said. "Our guys know that teams are going to press them ... we're just short-handed."

Short-handed or not, the Nittany Lions (10-5, 2-2 Big Ten) still had some say in the matter: Six different players recorded a steal, including 6-foot-6 freshman Jamelle Cornley, who finished with two.

"We normally press every now and then, but we pressed a couple possessions at a time," Cornley said. "It's pretty fun, but it's sometimes very tiring -- and I think that's one of the reasons why we didn't do it in the beginning of the season."

The Lions' patience certainly paid dividends then, as several key buckets were a direct result of the pressure afforded by the trap and press.

For a two-minute stretch in the second half, for instance, Penn State stole the ball four times -- which made up a good portion of the Lions' 17-2 run. DeChellis said he tried to mix things up like that defensively since the Lions are "not a great man-to-man defensive team."

"I thought we could battle them by fooling around with some presses and playing some different zones and giving them some different looks," DeChellis said.

But don't expect the Lions to substitute their zone for become tempted in overusing their half-court trap. DeChellis emphasized that wasn't even an afterthought.

"You gotta pick your spots," he said. "There are some teams you're not going to be able to press because they've got tremendous ball handlers and they've got seniors."

DeChellis compared his team to guerillas in using the press since the main objective is to hit, get a steal or two, and then get out. And after recording a season-high 12 steals, nobody's disputing that mentality.

And after DeChellis posted his first career win over Purdue last night, already giving Penn State its best record since 2000-2001, nobody's arguing with the head coach either.