Gator Country

Florida head coach Billy Donovan yells at the Gators during a timeout with eight minutes remaining during the second half of Florida's 64-50 win against the Southern Utah Thunderbirds on Thursday / Gator Country photo by Tim Casey

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, this was no Van Gogh or even a decently painted knockoff. Florida’s 64-50 win over Southern Utah bore very little resemblance to anything remotely artistic but Billy Donovan saw plenty enough pretty basketball in the first two games of the season. Thursday night he got warts and all ugly and he was perfectly fine with that.

Now, given the choice he would prefer if the 19th-ranked Gators avoid too many 1-16 shooting nights from the three-point stripe in the future. Do that too many times in the Southeastern Conference and you wind up on the wrong end of the score but Donovan really did need to see how his team would react on a night when they couldn’t buy a three and too many offensive possessions were run on fast forward.

“I thought our offense was so quick,” said Donovan. “We never ever once got deep into the shot clock and we tried to score within the first 10-12 seconds on most of our possessions and when we did run offense good things happened. I was much, much more pleased in this game with the way we won than in beating Bradley or beating Toledo by 20-plus points because this forced us to grow in a different way than those other two games did.”

Translation: Billy Donovan wanted to see if his team had the stomach to win a game that he probably knew coming in was going to be ugly. He had seen the Thunderbirds on film and it’s not like he was unfamiliar with their coach, Roger Reid, who has always run these Princeton-like offenses that run spin like a wheel around a high post feed.

If the Gators had faced this Southern Utah team a year ago on a night when they were too impatient to work the offense and the shots weren’t dropping, Donovan has a pretty good idea what would have happened.

“Last year when we would have had a shooting night like that we wouldn’t even have attempted to play defense, not even tried to play defense,” said Donovan. 

In polite terms, that 2007-08 team was one massive complication, an already poor defensive team that lacked the maturity to deal with adverse circumstances, particularly on the offensive end. When they couldn’t buy a shot they went into some serious funks, which probably has plenty to do with 12 losses and a season that ended in the NIT semifinals instead of the NCAA Tournament, where they were fixtures the previous nine seasons.

Thursday night was one of those nights when the Gators got plenty of good looks from the three-point stripe but 15 straight scuds kept them from waltzing to an easy win over the visiting Thunderbirds. A half inch here, a half inch there, the shots go down and it’s a yawner.

“You always talk as a coach how fragile shooting the ball is,” said Donovan. “We must have had out of our 16 threes, 10 of them hit the back of the rim and you talk about just our guys just being a little bit shorter on their shot, probably could have made 12 or 13 threes.”

Those silly millimeters that separated a feathery swish from an oven-fired brick turned out to be a blessing in disguise from Donovan’s standpoint. Instead of pouting or those why me looks to the bench that he got used to last year when the Gators went into a shooting funk, he saw a team that wouldn’t allow its offensive frustrations carry over to the defensive end.

“I thought our offense tonight frustrated us and we never ever forced them to guard for periods and stretches at a time,” said Donovan. “If you want to talk about time of possession, they [Southern Utah] made us guard for 35 seconds every single time down the court and we had some careless turnovers, some missed opportunities on the break, we shot the ball too quick, we tried to score too quick … it was almost like okay, we’re going to play defense.”

So they played defense and maybe it wasn’t what you would call strangling, lock down defense, it was very blue collar in nature. Whether it was man-to-man or a 2-3 zone, the Gators did a very good job of rotating, fighting over the top of screens, helping out and getting hands in the face of shooters. Maybe they still have work to polish up the defense but there was no lack of effort or intensity.

Perhaps it is a sign of a more mature Florida basketball team that they didn’t allow the offensive frustrations to overwhelm them. Last season you could almost tell what kind of night it was going to be for the Gators in the first five minutes. If the shots weren’t going to fall, their whole game was affected.

The shots weren’t falling Thursday night but the Gators dug in on defense, forced 21 turnovers --- the third straight game in which they’ve forced 20 or more turnovers --- and didn’t give the Thunderbirds a whole lot of clean looks at the basket. For a team that relies on a lot of motion to create layup opportunities, Southern Utah shot only 42.9 percent (21-49) overall and just 31.3 percent (5-16) on three-pointers.

Florida’s defensive numbers might have been better and the margin of victory wider if the Gators could have converted turnovers into points off the press. When Donovan inserted Ray Shipman (four points, four steals) into the lineup and unleashed full court pressure on the Thunderbirds in the second half, it was extremely disruptive but the Gators just couldn’t convert on the offensive end.

“He [Shipman] adds a different element, there’s no question,” said Donovan. “When we got him in there, he I thought changed the game a little bit on the defensive end of the floor. The problem is we weren’t scoring enough to get the press on.”

With the press creating havoc for the Southern Utah guards, the Gators were on the verge of blowing the game wide open but that inability to convert on the offensive end forced Donovan to ratchet down the heat.

In a way, that, too, was a blessing in disguise.

“I thought the press was really effective in the second half,” said Donovan. “We were close in the first half and in the second half of opening up the game and part of me is happy that we really didn’t open up the game because we were challenged and forced to handle things that we would not have been able to handle [last year].”

And the way the Gators handled it by (a) actually playing some defense and (b) never letting up on the intensity even when they had to back off the full court pressure allowed them to win a game they might have actually lost last year. Donovan has too many good shooters and this is a team that is all too willing to make the extra pass so there probably won’t be too many games that require a Dan Werner three-ball with 22.1 seconds remaining to keep the Gators from hanging a bagel in the three-point shots made column in the box score.

You have to figure the Gators will turn in more good shooting nights than bad but for those nights when they’re laying enough bricks to build a condo, at least they’ve got it in their memory banks that they can go about the business of winning with some hard work and effort on the defensive end. That’s a far cry from where they were this time last year.

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