For the Florida Gators (16-7, 6-4 SEC) to reach their goal of a comfortable seed in the NCAA Tournament they’ll need to avoid taking any bad losses and that will be what’s on the line February 13 when they take on the LSU Tigers (12-11, 4-6 SEC). Importantly for the Gators, LSU is currently 94th in the NET and with the game taking place in Gainesville it will be a quadrant-3 game. This means Florida doesn’t have much opportunity to build their resume in this instance but a loss could certainly hurt.
LSU is in their second year under head coach Matt McMahon, a name that Florida showed some interest in during their coaching change. Unfortunately for the Tigers, this era has not been going well. In McMahon’s first year the Tigers finished dead last in the SEC going 2-16 in league play and while year two has been a slight improvement they are nowhere close to the relevancy they crave. In non-conference play they took one of the worst losses college basketball saw this year, dropping a buy game to Nicholls State (276th in KenPom) while just coming out victorious in games that were closer than they should have been to North Texas and Southeastern Louisiana. Now in SEC play the Tigers have lost five of their last six and are coming off a 109-92 loss to Alabama.
While the record doesn’t look great for the Tigers and they’ve suffered some bad losses they have shown the ability to play up and get some wins against decent teams. They have a 86-80 win over a Wake Forest team that controlled the Gators, and they blasted Texas A&M 68-53 on the road–another team that frustrated the Gators.
With an NCAA Tournament at-large berth out of the question for LSU right now they are largely fighting for SEC Tournament seeding and to try to get hot at the right time. Currently the Tigers sit at 10th in the league and with only two wins separating the Gators in 5th and Georgia in 11th–you can quickly move up the standings with wins.
During the offseason the big pickup for LSU was Jalen Cook, a rare “boomerang” transfer who started at LSU before transferring to Tulane and then ultimately returning to Baton Rouge. Cook missed the first 10 games of the season to injury (part of the reason the Tigers didn’t play particularly well during that stretch) but started filling up the stat sheet the moment he got on the floor. Averaging 15.9 points and 2.8 assists Cook has been the offensive engine for the Tigers and he does it largely by constantly getting into the paint. Standing at 6’0”, 194 pounds Cook is a small but sneakily powerful guard and it can be difficult for bigger defenders to keep their feet in front of him and when Cook gets dribble penetration things start to look much better for the LSU offense. Florida has had some difficulty with these kinds of small, quick guards recently with their bigger more physical backcourt and this will be a challenging matchup. It will be interesting to see if the Gators try to match speed a bit more with Walter Clayton or try to overwhelm Cook with length putting Zyon Pullin on him. It’s also a possibility that Todd Golden tasks Riley Kugel with trying to slow him down as Kugel has started to be trusted with difficult defensive assignments.
Another player shouldering a lot of the offensive load is Jordan Wright who may sound familiar to you as this is his fifth year in the SEC, though his first four years were spent at Vanderbilt. Wright is a physical 6’6” wing who was known as more of a defender than a scorer with the Commodores though he has been unlocked as a scorer at LSU. A bully ball wing, the 235 pound Wright is very good in the mid-post and on the block taking on smaller players and he’s been able to score the ball consistently.
A player the Gators will have to circle on the scouting report in 7’0” Will Baker, a transfer from Nevada. Baker is going to be a concern for the Gators because he’s one of the best pick and pop centers they have seen this year and he has the ability to capitalize on Florida’s “drop” pick and roll coverage that they love to use. The drop is all about keeping guards out of the paint by having the screen defender play well below the level of the ball, and that makes the pick and pop three a weakness of the strategy. So far this season it hasn’t been a problem for the Gators who haven’t seen a lot of shooting bigs but that will change with Will Baker. Baker has shot 36%, 36%, and 41% from three the last three seasons and can get hot in a hurry just like he did in LSU’s most recent game against Alabama where he had two pick and pop threes in the first few minutes of the game. The Gators may need to have a defensive adjustment ready for if he starts making threes, though if they take that away Baker is also capable of going down on the block and scoring with his size.
Part of the reason the Tigers have struggled this year is that they have a roster that sometimes doesn’t seem to fit particularly well and often has disjointed lineups. The three players already discussed are the scorers for LSU, but outside of Wright they’re known to be poor defenders. Then when you look at the rest of the rotation in Trae Hannibal, Tyrell Ward, Jalen Reed, Mwani Wilkinson, and Derek Fountain you see guys that are quality defenders but guys that have very little offensive game. This makes finding a flow extremely difficult for Coach McMahon who at all times has several non-scorers on one end and poor defenders on the other. The Tigers can go on runs offensively when they have their three scorers on the floor but that lineup will give up points on the other end, and when they put out their defenders they can really lock things down on their own end but then struggle mightily on the other.
For the Gators a key will have to be guarding the Jalen Cook-Will Baker pick and roll. When guarding talented offensive players you have to decide what you’re willing to live with and what the Gators will try to take away and what they’ll concede to the downhill Cook and the shooting Baker will be very interesting.
Florida and LSU will tip off at 8 PM ET on February 13 and it will be televised on SEC Network.