Following a pair of losses to Arkansas and Kentucky after losing Colin Castleton to a season-ending injury the Gators will be challenged once again Saturday taking on the Vanderbilt Commodores.
This will be the second meeting of the two teams this season with Vanderbilt getting the first win of the season, picking apart Florida’s defense on their way to an 88-80 victory. At the time, it was looking like the Commodores were going to go on a bit of a run and give themselves an outside shot at making the NCAA Tournament. Beating the Gators gave them a three-game winning streak and they followed that game up with wins over South Carolina and Auburn, gaining momentum and building a bit of a resume. However, the Vanderbilt hype train fell off the rails in their most recent contest as they lost to the lowly LSU Tigers, a team that had only one SEC win up to that point and was riding a 14-game losing streak.
That loss likely extinguishes any chance the Commodores have at an at-large berth, but they are still a team that’s playing good basketball entering the late stages of the SEC season and they have belief that they can knock off just about anyone in the league. They have gotten wins over Arkansas, Auburn, and Tennessee, and they played second place Texas A&M tight.
As things currently stand, Vanderbilt is 8th in the SEC at 8-7 with an overall record of 15-13. Florida is next at 9th place, holding down a 7-8 record in the league and 14-14 overall.
An unfortunate storyline that will now follow the Gators is the fact that they haven’t had a losing season since 2015 in Billy Donovan’s last season when they finished 16-17. That team had to play walk-on Jacob Kurtz a significant amount of minutes due to injury, and even then they finished 34th in KenPom, an impressive number that suggests they were a lot better than the record would indicate and that they had some poor luck in close games. This year’s Gators are 55th in KenPom, and while they have had some poor luck in close games and had the ultimate bad luck of losing Colin Castleton–even before the injury they weren’t playing like a top-50 team in college basketball. Finishing above .500 is a somewhat arbitrary number that is affected a lot by strength of schedule, of which the Gators had quite a difficult one, but it’s certainly a number that’s going to register both nationally and with fans.
Entering the second matchup of the season, Florida is going to have to figure out how to slow down a Vanderbilt offense that was getting whatever they wanted against the Gators. Head coach Jerry Stackhouse is known as a quality offensive mind and he used a number of creative actions away from the ball to get quality looks and it seemed like just when the Gators figured out how to defend one action, he’d run a counter that created another easy bucket.
One of the common actions Stackhouse and Vanderbilt like to run are “stagger” screens away from the ball, of which they’ll get multiple different reads off of. Here are a few examples of Vanderbilt scoring with these looks:
Vanderbilt finished the game scoring 1.21 points per possession on the Gators, one of the worst defensive showings of the season so far. According to KenPom the Commodores are the 34th best offense in the country and when they are running their actions crisply they are as difficult to guard as it gets.
One player the Gators will be looking to limit is center Liam Robbins who had a career night against them finishing with 32 points, 10 rebounds, and 4 blocks. This kickstarted a stretch of the best basketball Robbins has played in his career having 24, 24, and 23 points in the games since cooking the Gators, establishing himself as one of the best interior scorers in the SEC. What makes Robbins’ offensive game impressive is that he doesn’t need a lot of plays ran for him–he’s constantly going to get into space around the rim and open himself up to quality angles to catch and finish, allowing him to not only rack up points but to do it efficiently. Size is also a factor in his success as he’s listed at 7’0” and 250 pounds and he can overwhelm a lot of opposing centers trying to match up with him. This is a massive concern for the Gators who couldn’t contain him when they had Castleton in the lineup. Stackhouse is almost certainly going to look to exploit the center matchup and the Gators will need to have a plan in place for how they’re going to handle the low post touches for Robbins.
With the Castleton injury the Gators lost the shot blocking presence that allowed their defensive scheme to work. There was a lengthy stretch where the Gators were playing like a top-10 defensive team in the country but since Castleton got injured they’re back to square one, struggling to guard both Arkansas and Kentucky. Considering that Vanderbilt was one of the few teams that were able to cut up Florida’s defense while they were at full strength the Gators could have major issues now that they’re without their man in the middle.
Florida will look to avoid spiralling out of control as they will enter this game 1-5 in their last 6 games.
The Gators and Commodores will face off in Nashville on February 25th at 6 PM ET, and it will be televised on ESPN 2.