Florida kicks off their 2023-24 basketball season on Monday when the Gators welcome Loyola University Maryland to Gainesville.
The Greyhounds are coming off a 13-20 season where they finished 8th in the Patriot league. Head coach Tavaras Hardy, in his 6th season with Loyola Maryland (often shown at Loyola MD in media communications), did well to bring back a number of quality pieces and should have an improved season. Picked 6th in the Patriot League preseason poll a modest improvement is anticipated for the Greyhounds, but they could end up surprising people.
Deon Perry is the leading returner from a scoring standpoint after averaging 11.4 points, 2.0 assists, and 1.5 steals last season. Only standing at 5’8” he plays the game with a chip on his shoulder and most notably is a lights-out shooter from deep hitting 42% of his threes last season on just under 6 attempts per game. He isn’t much of a finisher when he gets into the lane, so Florida will have to be aggressive taking away his pull up threes and trust their help defense if he gets into the lane.
One of the strengths of Loyola MD is the size they have for the Patriot League level. Most notably they return two starters, Golden Dike (6’10”, 248 pounds) and Alonso Faure (6’10”, 235 pounds) who have both been fairly productive bigs. Dike averaged 7.3 points and 6.7 rebounds while Faure contributed 8.9 points and 6.1 rebounds, making for a physical two-big attack you don’t often see from conferences such as the Patriot. Both can be factors on the offensive glass, but they’re mostly notable on the defensive boards where they both finished in the top-100 of defensive rebounding rate last season.
6’10”, 230 pound Veljko Ilic and his brother, 6’9”, 220 pound Milos Ilic come off the bench and while they haven’t been regular contributors as underclassmen they are big bodies to bring off the bench, particularly for a team that will have to contend with a Florida roster playing multiple bigs.
The Greyhounds play a slow, methodical brand of basketball and don’t like to push in transition. They will try to slow the game down as much as possible–something that Florida will try to do the exact opposite of. Florida will have to guard a lot of actions in the halfcourt that look to get dump offs to their big men and if they get stops–they’ll have to look to run. Loyola MD will mix in some situational pressing and 2-3 zones to confuse their opponent and maximize their frontcourt size, and sometimes those can be annoying to go against in the first game of the season before all systems are in place.
Florida’s presumed starters will be:
Walter Clayton
Riley Kugel
Will Richard
Tyrese Samuel
Micah Handlogten
This is the lineup that started both of Florida’s scrimmages, so you have to expect they’ll be the starting five on opening night. Handlogten sat out of Florida’s intersquad scrimmage on Thursday, though it was thought to be precautionary and that he’ll be good to go for Monday.
A pleasant surprise came with the announcement that San Francisco transfer Julian Rishwain would be cleared to play for opening night, a surprise given that he’s coming off a major knee injury in January of last year that was thought to put his 2023-24 season in jeopardy. Whether or not he’ll crack the rotation we’ll have to see, but it’s a great story that he was able to get fully healthy.
This game will take place Monday, November 6th at 8 PM ET and will be televised on SEC Network+.