The Florida Gators have made Jacksonville home this year with the renovation of the O’Connell Center keeping the team out of Gainesville until late December. UNF Arena has been especially kind to Florida basketball. The Gators traveled to UNF last season for the NIT and nearly put up triple-digits in the 97-68 victory. Something about that place gets Florida’s offense going.
The Gators had their first 90-plus point game and largest margin of victory of the season, with a 91-60 win over the Ospreys. It was the first true road game of the season, but the Gators felt at home.
Chris Chiozza looked especially comfortable, as he went 5-of-8 from the floor, including 3-of-5 from beyond the arc, and made all three of his free-throws to total 16 points for the night. “I like this gym a lot,” Chiozza said. “It’s kind of like playing in a high school gym — and we were all pretty good shooters in high school.”
Florida shot 58.5 percent from the field and 47.4 percent from long-range, with 9-of-19 three-balls made. Eleven different Gators scored in the game. Chiozza (16), Justin Leon (13), Canyon Barry (12) and Devin Robinson (10) all had double-digit scoring nights.
Despite a great offensive night according to the numbers, head coach Mike White was not impressed with the overall offensive performance. He was, however, happy with Chiozza. He said this was his best game.
“I didn’t think we were great offensively and then you look down at the numbers and say ‘my goodness, we shot a really good percentage’,” he said. “Chris Chiozza obviously steps up and hits three threes … I thought Chris Chiozza led that charge, not only scoring for himself, but getting other guys shots all the way down until the end.”
Florida was in a pretty good defensive situation with UNF. Dallas Moore was the only guy the Gators really needed to stop offensively. They didn’t. He had a monster night, going 12-for-21 from the field and draining six three-pointers for 31 points. Moore scored 15 of UNF’s first 17 points of the game and finished with more than half of his teams’ total offense.
“We did a poor job there,” said White on defending Moore. “Credit Dallas, he’s a terrific player and they do a good job of putting him in positions to be successful. Did a better job on him last spring, in my opinion. He’s a terrific offensive player. He’s really good. He can create space to get his jumper off, going right, going left. He’s got a really unique ability to make those lefty running hooks at full speed with a high degree of difficulty. Sometimes he makes it look easy.”
Luckily for Florida, the rest of the Ospreys were cold as ice on offense. Everyone besides Moore combined for 8-for-32 overall and 0-for-10 from three. UNF turned the ball over 20 times, with nine steals from the Gators’ defense. Chiozza, Kasey Hill and KeVaughn Allen combined for all nine of Florida’s steals.
Another major factor for the Gators in this game was a huge advantage in depth. As mentioned above, 11 of Florida’s 12 players scored at least once and every single player in a blue jersey had minutes in the game. Florida’s bench came in to score 51 of the 91 points.
“A lot of positives come from the depth,” said White. “Sometimes when you sub just for fatigue and you find that the guy that you subbed the other guy out for is playing pretty well, and boom, he gets out there. We kinda fell into that substitution, that was a pretty good decision there … I like our depth. On certain nights, I like our depth more than other nights. I thought tonight we had seven or eight that were in a pretty good rhythm, probably eight or nine offensively, but again, you can’t hang your hat on shooting 59 (percent) and 47 (percent) from three every night.”
The Gators have not been a great offensive team this season and certainly cannot hang their hats on those kind of offensive performances every single night, but they have to be feeling pretty good as the No. 24 team in the nation getting ready to square off against No. 5 Duke next Tuesday.