Don’t look now, but Florida basketball is here! Well, maybe not entirely, but close. On Tuesday night the Gators have an exhibition game with the Lynn University Fighting Knights, a division-II school that will offer the Gators their final tune up before kicking off the season against North Florida.
The game will be broadcast on SEC Network+ and there will also be a stream available of the Florida Gators website. With this being the first opportunity to see the new-look Gators in action this will be a viewing event you’ll definitely want to take part in. Here are some things to note about the Fighting Knights.
Lynn has been a successful D-II program as of late and regularly makes the postseason tournament. This year’s team has three former D-I players in Christian Peevy (Incarnate Word), Jordan Allen (Rider), and Darius Morris (Presbyterian) as well as some high school recruits from traditional powerhouses like Braxton Bartlett (Oldsmar Christian) and Kenneth Nwachukwu (Grandview Prep) and JUCO transfers from historically potent programs like Ibrahima Sankare (Chipola College) and Giovanni Fraser (Daytona State College). So, while this is a D-II program their talent level would rival a lot of low-major D-I schools.
They are also well coached under the instruction of Jeff Price, a man with 22 years of head coaching experience. In addition to coaching at the D-II level he’s coached D-I at Georgia Southern and South Alabama and he also has worked as a scout for the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. He has a 386-253 career record and has made the postseason 12 times. In terms of personal accolades he has been named the NCAA Division II Coach Of The Year and also was named Southern Conference Coach Of The Year in his first year at Georgia Southern.
Playing a D-I school won’t be anything new for Lynn as they play a few exhibitions against D-I schools almost every season including a matchup with fellow Boca Raton school Florida Atlantic (currently coached by former Gator assistant Dusty May) every year. Mostly notably in the last few seasons they have played Maryland and NC State. In this year’s iteration in their series with Florida Atlantic they ran into a hot shooting Owls team and ended up losing 92-75, a sign that the Gators could be in for a blowout win.
Lynn’s two best players are a pair of their D-I transfers in guard Jordan Allen and wing Christian Peevy. Allen is a good creator at 6’4” who can get to his jumper with relative ease and Peevy is a slasher with great length at 6’7” adept at getting into the paint and drawing fouls. An important player for the Fighting Knights will be 6’9”, 220 pound Kenneth Nwachukwu who is the biggest player on their roster who will inevitably be tasked with trying to body up Kerry Blackshear Jr.
As a team, Lynn shoots the ball really well and was 39% from behind the arc last season. They’ll also really look to attack the offensive glass with a size advantage over a lot of their opponents, but we’ll see how they manage that against a bigger Florida team. Last season saw them struggle a lot with turnovers (something that was also on display in their matchup with Florida Atlantic) and against a Gators team that wants to generate deflections and steals that could be an issue.
From a Gators standpoint this is an opportunity to build some chemistry against a team they haven’t seen before. Running offense in practice is always different from running it against a totally foreign team and watching for how they move the ball and what types of set they run will be intriguing. Perhaps most interesting will be how they use Kerry Blackshear Jr., a scoring force on the inside completely unlike anything Mike White has had on his teams before. How they choose to utilize him will be a great look into what to expect this season and in itself will make it worthwhile to tune into the game.
This Florida team will be a treat to watch and even though Tuesday’s game is an exhibition you won’t want to miss it.