Hit with injuries, the Florida Gators have been forced to use a small roster in the opening games this season and many have pointed to fatigue as the culprit in Florida’s slow start.
Seven games into the season Florida hasn’t played a complete game yet — performance wise — and even when they played their best half of the season against Kansas, they returned to their poor shooting ways.
But if you were to ask head coach Billy Donovan if any of the poor performances were an outcome of fatigue, he’d tell you no.
“Am I as a coach putting them in a situation where they are tired?’” head coach Billy Donovan said. “Then you play a game like Kansas on the road, where you’ve got limited numbers like you said, and I’m going to say we pressed three or four possessions. I’m looking at the minutes right now, Frazier played I think at the most 34. These guys are not absorbing 40 minutes in the game.”
Donovan added.
“You think about 16, 12, 8 and 4, those timeouts, plus the five that I get. There’s enough rest in there.”
Along with Frazier who played 34 minutes and almost the duration of a college game, Dorian Finney-Smith played 31 minutes, Kasey Hill 32 and the freshman Devin Robinson logged in 28 on his best game.
On paper, some Gator players are playing almost the whole game with no reinforcements due to any depth. Jacob Kurtz went from playing in the high 30s in Battle Atlantis and was reduced to 24 in an effort to get him to be more productive.
Alike on how managing minutes has become a factor; Florida has shown bad basketball in the second half this season.
The Gators are outscoring their opponents in the first half 218 to 184, but in the second half their opponents have the advantage 227 to 206. A 21-point differential and a big reason why Florida isn’t closing out games.
When considering fatigue, Donovan said his team didn’t press a lot and so it was something he looked at earlier in the season of maybe the press is sort of taking the players away. He said they’re going to have to understand that as the games continue to go on the intensity gets amped up.
The first half against Kansas, Florida showed the talent level the team has and are capable of scoring the basketball. The team gained much confidence after that showing, especially away in a hectic atmosphere at Allen Fieldhouse.
Robinson said the team settled in the second half. They started to go away from the team concept and just started playing for themselves and late in the game they started connecting, but it was too late.
After experiencing that high and low, the freshman understands what it’s going to take to sustain the duration of a game.
“I mean we saw what we could do,” Robinson said after gaining confidence from his career night. “Now we have the confidence to, like we can beat anybody in the country, we just need to follow that for 40 minutes not 20 minutes so that really boost our confidence as a whole.”
At the end of the day, what it will come down to for Florida to prevail in finishing opponents is maintaining a confident state of mind, as fatigue can’t be used as an excuse.
“I thought the minutes were pretty equally distributed,” Donovan said. “I don’t believe that the fatigue was a factor, I just don’t believe that.”