Florida basketball head coach Todd Golden met with the media on Monday afternoon to preview their upcoming matchup with Oklahoma. The Gators moved up to No.2 in the latest AP Poll following wins over Mississippi State and South Carolina last week.
Here’s everything Golden had to say.
On Micah Handlogten’s performance against South Carolina:
“I thought he was great. Obviously, it was going to be a very emotional moment for him. I thought he played well. Five assists, one turnover, two blocks, two steals, made a nice and-1 bucket. I thought his cardio was in a good place. There was one stretch in the first half where we didn’t get a dead ball for a while and he fatigued a little bit. But to be able to play 20 minutes in his first game back, in a high-level SEC game I think says a lot about him both as a competitor and the way he’s kept himself and gotten himself into really good shape.
On Oklahoma guard Jeremiah Fears:
“He’s really talented. He’s had some really good moments this year for them, and to be an elite guard on an SEC team as a freshman says a lot about his talents. He’s an explosive player; we got to do a good job. The main thing is the ball screen for him, making sure we don’t let him to get comfortable. He’s done a great job getting downhill, finishing at the rim, getting fouled. We got to try and keep him out of the paint and not allow his play making to show up for others. It will be a big challenge, they’re good in transition, they’re a very good offensive team, they’re efficient, they’re good from two, good from three, we got to turn them over and make them take tough shots.”
On Oklahoma forward Jalon Moore:
“They got other guys too, but those two would be, I’d say, the most important in terms of making sure we don’t allow them to get comfortable. Moore is average 18.5 a game, something along those lines. Shooting over 60 from 2, over 40 from 3. He’s a unique matchup. The good news for us, I think Tommy [Haugh] is really good defending those types of guys. It’s going to be a little bit of a challenge without Condo [Alex Condon] and Sam [Alexis] with our frontcourt depth, but we may put a smaller guy on him to kind of stay in front and not let him downhill going right. But Oklahoma is definitely really hard to guard. I’d put them in that same bucket with Vanderbilt, where you can have different ideas and things you’re trying to execute and still have a really hard time guarding them. Our best bet for winning this game is to try to limit them the best we can that way, but by really hurting them on the glass and on the offensive end as well, where hopefully their lack of size shows up more for us. But they’re tough to guard.”
On getting a feel for Florida’s new rotation:
“It’s a big challenge, to be honest. I thought our first half showed that a little bit. We weren’t super comfortable and didn’t seem like we were 100 percent of ourselves. I thought the second half we did a really good job. But it’s a challenge. We have five perimeter players who are playing pretty well right now, and it’s just hard to try to get all those guys time. Urby [Urban Klavzar] was a little bit of the odd man out Saturday. Only played seven minutes and had been playing 15 prior to Alijah [Martin] coming back. Alijah, obviously, is an insanely high-level player and he’s going to be playing. I thought he looked really good in the second half after he got his legs back under him. In a way, it’s a good problem to have, trying to find all these guys minutes. But we’ve got to make sure we’re comfortable and in a good rhythm as we wind down the regular season here.”
On having to adjust to a new lineup:
“About as well as we can. It is. It’s a challenge. Obviously, we didn’t know we were going to have Alijah until really the night before, day, morning of, just making sure our rotations are where they need to be. Everybody on the outside looking in thinks it’s kind of that straight line up – and it’s just not. We’re working through those things. Denzel [Aberdeen] is obviously playing at an insanely high level right now. His minutes are earned, and we anticipate him continuing to play really well. Obviously Will [Richard], Walt [Clayton Jr.] and Alijah [Martin] have the freedom and the respect to get a lot of minutes every night from here on out the rest of the year. Urby has earned it. He’s played really well in one of our best stretches of the season. Again, the main thing we talked about with our team after the game; we have to remain unselfish. I think that’s going to be the biggest key to our success the rest of the way. It’s going to be a different guy every night. Some guys aren’t going to be playing as much as they want every night and we just can’t allow that to affect us big picture-wise in terms of our goals. If we can continue to channel that, our team has been incredibly unselfish this year and be that way the rest of the way, I think it will prove to be very good for us. But it’s a daily challenge.”
On confidence level that selfishness won’t become an issue:
“I definitely don’t take it for granted. I think we gotta address it every day. I think because of who we have in our program, I think we have a great chance to not allow it to affect us. But at the same time, human nature takes over sometimes and these guys have aspirations and goals beyond Florida. And we just gotta make sure we continue to understand that if we win at a really, really high level, those things in terms of what happens after your college career ends up working itself out.”
On the last four games helping condition the players for that:
“I think so, for sure. And again, we’ve had great attitudes about it. I use Alijah as an example. It would be very easy for him after getting ready to come back to be like, ‘Ah, I need my starting spot.’ And he just wasn’t that way. He was very understanding of us staying with Denzel until Alijah gets fully back healthy, fully back acclimated. And when I had talked to him about it, he had an incredible attitude and was like, ‘Denzel deserves it, I’m ready when you need me.’ Those types of conversations. And I definitely don’t take those for granted because it says a lot about his maturity and his unselfishness, but that was an example of Alijah. I think all of our guys are really that way. They’ve been really good that way all year.”
On what Golden is honing in on during the final stretch:
“It’s a constant self evaluation after every game. One area that we weren’t good enough on Saturday night was our transition defense. I thought we kind of gave up more points in transition than we normally do. Part of that was having Micah and Rueben [Chinyelu] out there at the same time for the first time all year and different guys having different roles and responsibilities. So, transition defense is an area that we gotta make sure we stay sharp. As we play these different lineups, just our different defenses and ball-screen coverages, will be important, especially against a team like Oklahoma that spreads you out and is hard to guard. That’ll be important for our game tomorrow night. But constant self evaluation leads to us trying to troubleshoot and figure things out. But that was one area on Saturday I thought we could have been a lot better.”
On Walter Clayton’s evolution as a passer:
“I think he’s a good job all year of kind of taking with the defense gives him. And there’s gonna be times where we want him to be very aggressive trying to score the ball because that’s just what makes him such a great player, is his ability to score it from anywhere on the court. And his ability to play make, he had that ability last year. It didn’t show up as much with ZP [Zyon Pullin] on the ball as much as he was, but we were obviously very confident in his abilities to be able to take this on in the preseason. And the defenses lately have been trying to take the ball out of his hands and force other players on our team to beat them. And he’s done a great job of putting on time, on target passes to guys and they’ve been stepping up and hitting shots and finishing around the rim. And so that’s what good players do. There’s gonna be times where he gets 30 in a game because that’s what the defense is kind of, for lack of a term, giving him. And there’s gonna be times where he gets eight or nine assists because teams are putting two on the ball against him. And that’s why he’s playing like a First Team All-American right now.”
On how Denzel Aberdeen has progressed in a starting role:
“Honestly, the biggest thing for Zel is confidence. He’s had this within him for a while now, obviously his first year was kind of trying to figure out Division-1 basketball at this high level. And he was just young, you know, going up against guys like Kyle Lofton, a 23-year-old senior, and he was 18. And last year we saw him start breaking through a little bit but being a little inconsistent. And this year, I think he’s been so comfortable because he’s had a consistent role. He’s known he’s gonna be playing between 15 and 22, 25 minutes a night, depending on the game. He had some really good moments for us early in the year, and now in this opportunity to start where he’s played over 30 minutes, he’s just out there playing basketball. And the biggest thing for us, and what I’m most pleased with, is the way he’s shot the ball. He’s making perimeter shots at a great rate. We know his floor game is good. We’ve known he’s a great ball handler, a good playmaker for others. But this ability to knock down open shots the way he has had such a high rate has made us pretty explosive offensively. And he’s just playing with confidence. He’s not doing anything out there that we are surprised to see. He’s been able to make shots in practice. When he’s been on the second unit, he’s played really well against our starters in practice and I’m just happy for him that he’s done it in the setting that he has over the last four games.”
On how Micah Handlogten will fit in when Alex Condon comes back:
“It’s a good problem to have. I think we’ll have plenty of opportunities for those guys, though. We saw in the last game, we had three healthy frontcourt players in terms of our rotation and we very clearly could have used the fourth one to be able to give us some rest and keep those guys fresh. And even with Sam coming back, I think we’ll have room for all five of them to be honest. It might be different on every night. But you always feel, especially the way we play, like depth in the front line is incredibly important. And trust me we’ll find a way to utilize those guys effectively.”
On games where you lean on particular matchups:
“I don’t think about it that much in terms of actual matchup wise but I do think the strength of our team being our depth, there’s going to be opportunities where different guys show out more and I think that’s what happened over the last couple of weeks is Walter, Alijah and Will got off to such a great start to the year and we’ve been playing so well, I don’t want to say Denzel was an afterthought to opponents but when they are going through our scouting report he’s definitely going to be the fourth perimeter player and it’s just human nature to maybe think of not be as dialed on him but now he’s playing really, really well. He’s going to be moving up and that might provide opportunity for one of the other guys to get more opportunities, and again that’s just the benefit of being deep and having good balance is there’s only so much you can do to take away opponents’ strengths and we run into that issue a lot, and so when your lower usage guys or guys that aren’t at the top of the scouting report are able to get you 20 points in games, that makes you really hard to beat.”
On the ideal rotation size:
“I don’t know if there’s an ideal one necessarily but it’s just hard to play 10 guys a lot of minutes. You have really good players. Walt’s gonna play his 32 minutes a night. He could play 36 minutes depending on the game, or it could be at Auburn where he’s going to play 40 minutes. It’s just that kind of give and take. I feel great about all 10, I feel really good about 11, Isaiah [Brown] is really good but he’s behind some really, really talented older players, but he understands where he fits in, he understands his role but hopefully knock on wood we stay healthy to where that’s an issue and we’ll deal with if it is but in this league it’s very hard to stay healthy, every team has had injury issues and we have I think eight or nine healthy right now for our rotation so we’ll prepare for tomorrow night that way and see how it goes when we get fully healthy. I’ll worry about it then.”
On how much phsycial progress Micah Handlogten can make from now until the NCAA tournament”
“I think a ton. He’s in great shape but there’s kind of no shape like game shape if that makes sense. I think he was a little sore yesterday, in a good way, a little bit of Jello legs after that game and playing 20 [minutes]. But yeah, I anticipate he’ll be a lot better that way tomorrow night and then on Saturday again and I think by SEC Tournament time he’ll be fully back, not that he isn’t already but just from like a cardio standpoint and a leg standpoint, I think he’ll be fully back by that point.”
On Olivier Rioux’s development:
“He’s doing great. I think his body has transformed just the way he moves, he’s way more athletic now then when he got here and we always thought of Ollie is kind of a longer-term project so to speak, Not taking anything away from him just his natural trajectory and kind of his path but I’m very pleased with him, to be honest. He’s been incredibly coachable. He’s done everything we’ve asked him to do from a practice standpoint and I still feel good about his opportunity and his potential to become a good player.”