GAINESVILLE,
Fla. -- In the locker room after Florida’s dismal 75-70 home loss Saturday to
Southeastern Conference rival Tennessee, Gators coach Billy Donovan stood
before his stunned players and wrote three letters on the grease board.
NIT.
Scare
tactic? Not really. More like a reality check following a second straight
lopsided defeat and a way to put the current state of the Gators -- and how far
they need to go to reach their potential -- in its proper perspective.
“Don’t
take for granted what you have in front of you,” Donovan explained. “Have an
understanding and respect level of how good you think you are.”
After
Tuesday’s 20-point thrashing at Kentucky and having a 19-game home winning
streak stopped by a Tennessee team that was winless in seven road games this
season, the Gators (19-6, 7-3) ought to have a much clearer grasp on the
challenges they face and the work to be done in the final three weeks of the
season to have any chance at reaching their goals.
Answer:
A lot.
Tennessee
guard Trae Golden had 17 points and seven assists, power forward Jeronne Maymon
had 15 points and 11 rebounds, and guard Skylar McBee hit four 3-pointers in a
game that was nowhere close as the final score suggests. UT went on a 15-2 run
midway through the first half, opened a 17-point cushion before intermission
and never let the home team back in the game, much to the dismay of the
O’Connell Center crowd of 12,249.
The
Volunteers (13-12, 5-5), who beat up on the Gators in Knoxville in the SEC
opening for both teams last month, took advantage of a depleted UF lineup with
36 points in the paint and a 36-30 advantage in the rebounding column.
Florida
went into the game minus the services of backup guard Mike Rosario, the team’s
top scorer among reserves, who suffered a hip injury in practice Thursday. The
Gators also were without backup center Cody Larson, who did not even come to
the game because of flu-like symptoms.
So when
sophomore Will Yeguete, the team’s best frontcourt defender and rebounder,
suffered what Donovan later called a concussion barely six minutes into the
game -- and UT ahead 9-8 -- the Gators quickly found themselves outmanned in
numbers and unable to roll out their fullcourt pressure on defense.
All five
UF starters played at least 27 minutes; with four of them logging at least 34.
“That
made it difficult,” said freshman swingman Bradley Beal, who led UF with 16
points and eight rebounds. “But at the same time, it’s not an excuse.”
Donovan
went a step further, in fact, basically saying his team was soft without ever
using the S-word. The need to be “hardened,” was what he talked about. It’s a
process that Chandler Parsons and friends had to go through a few years back --
to become an SEC championship squad and come within a game of the Final Four
last season -- and one this current bunch of players hasn’t truly had to
navigate yet.
Until
now.
“I don’t
know if it’s a crossroads, as much as it’s, ‘Who are we? Who do you want to
be?’ Donovan said.
The
answer to the first question, at least right now, is a team that is not shooting
the ball very well. The Gators struggles continued with 42.6 percent for the
game and 36.7 from the 3-point line. But even that second statistic is
deceiving. As poor as Florida was from the arc -- and 11-for-30 is bad --
the Gators made four of those bombs in the final 44 seconds, including one at
the buzzer, when the game was far out of reach.
“We had
the necessary pieces and the necessary mindset to win the game,” Tennessee
coach Cuonzo Martin said.
Needless
to the say, the Gators did not.
“This is
the first time we’ve had consecutive losses this year,” said junior guard Kenny
Boynton, who had 16 points. “It starts with practice. The main thing is
practice. We’ve not been focused in practice and now it’s carrying over into
games.”
Added
Beal, in the wake of the blowout loss at No. 1 Kentucky four days earlier:
“It’s real disappointing. We thought going into the game that [after Tuesday]
we were going to be pretty confident and that we were going to practice hard,
but we didn’t do that -- and we didn’t show up tonight. Coach Donovan said he
had a feeling we were going to come out pretty slow.”
They
came out slow, hit some more adversity, and got even slower. After Tennessee
shot 50 percent in the first half, including 45 from the arc, the Gators
trimmed the lead to 10 with 12:03 to go, then did not score a field goal for
nearly eight minutes.
“I think
that these are the kind of experiences where you get kind of hardened a little
bit -- and our team needs to be hardened,” Donovan said, going to his post-game
theme again. “We need to be more battle-tested, battle-weary, sort of speak. We
need to go through some of that stuff.”
It’s how
they respond to “that stuff” that will define the rest of the season, starting
with back-to-back road trips to Alabama Tuesday and next weekend at
Arkansas.
Until
then, once more for effect: NIT
“It’s
eye-opening,” Boynton said. “We can wake up today or we can be in the NIT.”
