It doesn’t take someone with clairvoyant powers to know what was at the top of Billy Donovan’s Christmas wish list. With the Southeastern Conference schedule set to begin in two weeks, Donovan needs three of his players to get healthy to have the kind of depth he envisioned when the season began.
Donovan began practice back in October with 12 scholarship players but prize freshman Eloy Vargas, a 6-10 center with a great offensive skill set, was unable to go because he was still recovering from complicated bone spur surgery during the summer. A week before the first exhibition game, sophomore Adam Allen, who was expected to be one of the most improved players on the team, suffered a deep bone bruise to his knee and he has been unable to go since then.
One day after the exhibition game with Warner Southern, sophomore guard Jai Lucas, who started all 36 games last year, decided to transfer out and that gave Donovan a bench of nine players — the same number he had last year when the Gators struggled with depth problems. Florida’s depth has been further reduced in recent games because freshman Allan Chaney (5.1 points, 2.6 rebounds per game) has been trying to play through a sprained foot and that has cut deeply into his playing time.
With a short bench, the last thing Donovan can afford is foul trouble but that’s what he got Monday night when the Gators beat Georgia Southern, 88-81, at the Stephen C. O’Connell Center. Senior guard Walter Hodge (7.6 points, 2.1 assists per game) and junior forward Dan Werner (10.5 points, 4.y rebounds per game), got in foul trouble early (they eventually fouled out) and that severely cut Donovan’s options, especially with Chaney available for limited minutes because of his foot.
“We went from basically nine scholarship players to seven,” said Donovan, who gets a look at the Gators (9-2) for the first time after the Christmas break Sunday evening against Winthrop (1-9) in the Orange Bowl Classic at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise (6:30 p.m.; Sunshine Network).
The Gators don’t figure to get much of a challenge Sunday from Winthrop, a program that has had a run of eight NCAA tournaments (the last four in a row) in ten years. Under second-year coach Randy Peele, the Eagles have only a win over North Greenville College to show for this season, which is a bit of a surprise since Winthrop was expected to challenge for its fourth straight Big South Conference championship.
Winthrop doesn’t have anyone capable of handling Alex Tyus (14.5 points, 6.7 rebounds) in the middle and no one on the perimeter capable of handling Nick Calathes (15.6 points, 6.8 assists per game) so it figures that Donovan will have a chance to get some extended minutes out of 6-10 freshman center Kenny Kadji (4.3 points, 2.8 rebounds per game), who has come alive in the last two games with a combined 22 points and 14 rebounds. Kadji scored 15 points and grabbed seven rebounds against UCF last Saturday, his best game as a collegian.
After four days off for Christmas, Chaney should be healthy enough to play extended minutes and there is a possibility that Vargas will see his first action of the season. Vargas played his entire high school season on painful bone spurs that were surgically removed back in June. The surgery turned out to be a bit more complicated than expected, so the 6-10 native of Dominican Republic went through a long rehabilitation process that cost him months of strength and conditioning work. Since December 1, Vargas has been increasingly involved in practices and he’s expected to play for the first time either against Winthrop or Tuesday against Stetson.
Having Vargas available certainly adds to Donovan’s options. The more minutes Donovan can get in the low blocks out of Kadji, Vargas and Chaney, the more he can play Tyus at the high post. Tyus is at his best when he can see the ball go up and run to it instead of playing with his back to the basket where he sometimes seems a little lost when he has to first block out, then find the ball after it goes up.
Against Georgia Southern, Tyus had only six rebounds, all of them on the offensive end.
“We need more rebounding, especially on the defensive end out of Alex,” said Donovan. “ Alex is a really good offensive rebounder because he’s on the perimeter a lot and he’s moving around so he’s kind of a hard target to block out but when he gets inside around the basket when he’s playing inside, he’s got to make some more contact and defensive rebound some more.”
Although Vargas probably can’t be expected to play more than a minute or two at a time until he gets up to speed with the college game, Calathes says it’s a good thing to add the big guy into the mix.
“We need him and he’ll help us a lot,” said Calathes last week after the win over UCF. “He can do a lot of things with the ball but he’s not afraid to bang on the boards and he can block shots. He’s stronger than he looks and he’s not afraid to mix it up.”
The next two weeks figure to be critical for Allen, also. The 6-8, 225-pound sophomore has been frustrated by the slow-to-heal bone bruise. He tried to do some conditioning work a couple of weeks ago but was so sore afterward that he couldn’t go for a couple more days. A decision will be made within the next two weeks whether Allen can help the team this year or should he take a redshirt.
If Allen can somehow come back from his injury, it would give the Gators an extra perimeter player that can shoot the three. That’s been a problem area for Florida so far because of the prolonged shooting slump of Chandler Parsons (8.1 points, 5.3 rebounds per game). While Parsons has improved greatly as a rebounder and is playing better defense than he did last year, he’s hit only 9-38 from the three-point stripe (23.7 percent). Freshman Ray Shipman (4.6 points, 2.7 rebounds per game), who spells Parsons on the wing, is a slasher that can get to the rim but he’s struggled (1-10) from the three-point line.
The inability for the Gators to score from the wing has forced Donovan to play freshman point guard Erving Walker (9.3 points, 2.8 rebounds per game) on the wing to take advantage of his outside shooting (20-48, 41.7 percent). The Gators also need to get more than five shots per game from Hodge, who is hitting 41.3 percent (19-46) from the three-point line.
The Gators have four games (Winthrop, Stetson, NC State on January 3 and Longwood on January 6) before Ole Miss comes to town on January 10 to begin the Southeastern Conference grind. If Donovan can somehow get Vargas, Allen and Chaney healthy enough to play contributing minutes by then, Florida’s outlook for the remainder of the season will brighten considerably. It’s a whole lot easier to go through the 16-game SEC grind with 11 players on the bench instead of nine.