Hello my good friends!
As I write this, the Texas A&M loss on Wednesday night is still fresh on my mind. Now at 0-2 in the SEC things are starting to look a bit squeamish, and I can’t imagine a loss on Saturday would do much to help out fans that aren’t loving the makeup of this team (more on that later).
Things aren’t all sunny with Florida basketball, but I’m still going to come at you with some thoughts. Let’s go!
I’ve seen enough–I want more lineups where Trey Bonham is Florida’s primary point guard.
Entering the season it looked like St. Bonaventure transfer Kyle Lofton was the unmistakable starter, but those times are long gone. Lofton is exactly what should have been expected–he’s a savvy veteran who has excellent leadership skills, and he’s a smart positional defender. However, he struggles to shoot the basketball, and his lack of athleticism and ball skills means he isn’t someone who can go get a bucket on his own.
Florida is a team that needs someone who can create offense.
Trey Bonham, the other point guard on the team, has shown he can create offense at a high level and score even when the Gators on a whole are stuck in the mud, as shown on Wednesday when he had 21 points and was the only Gator to get anything going.
I also wrote about some lineup data last week (you should go read this at Gator Country if you haven’t already) and it showed that the Gators have been excellent when Bonham is the primary point guard.
Look, we’re starting to get into a bit of the danger zone here. Florida doesn’t have a good win yet, and they’re 0-2 in the SEC despite not playing the top teams in the league. They can’t keep rolling out the same lineups that have struggled and expect gigantic changes.
I think one way to instantly add some juice to the offense and change things up in a way that could be positive is to have more Trey Bonham as pure point guard minutes.
Just how bad are things offensively?
This thought is brief. Quite bad. The Gators are now 97th in adjusted offensive efficiency, the worst that Florida has been since Billy Donovan’s final season.
“Florida just needs to make shots” doesn’t cut it for me when evaluating Florida’s offense.
Some analysis of Florida’s offensive struggles has largely been “this team just can’t shoot!” and I simply do not agree with that. For starters–the Gators are 138th in the country in three-point percentage. Is that fantastic? No–but it’s not horrendous, not by any stretch.
Plus, I don’t think the Gators’ issue offensively is that they are missing shots or that they’re in a slump–it’s that they aren’t creating shots. Saying they are just missing shots is missing the root of the issue–they’re not creating good shots, and you can’t make shots if you’re only taking bad ones.
Shot creation is the issue, not just making them.
On the positive side, the Gators are very quickly improving on defense.
If you have been reading these newsletters all season long (first of all, I salute you!) you’ll remember that in the first weeks I was very critical of Florida’s defense. They were getting scrambled by the most basic of actions against, and they were abysmal with transition defense.
However, in the last couple of weeks they have started to look much better on defense and have been steadily climbing in both the eye test and the analytics. They’re now up to 30th in KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency metric, and their fight on the defensive end is just about the only thing that has kept them in games recently.
Todd Golden is a self-professed defense-first coach, and I think leaning into that is probably a good way to go as this team searches for some kind of identity. This is a talented roster with offensive pieces that I don’t think are being used properly, but if nothing else they have length and athleticism and players that want to play hard so even if the offensive system isn’t the right one or things aren’t working, they should always be able to fall back on defense.
On Saturday, the Gators will see Mike White again.
White took over an abysmal team at Georgia and has turned things around pretty quickly. They’re 11-3, and while that is largely due to playing a schedule that isn’t great they just beat Auburn by 8, the team the Gators opened up SEC by losing to. The Bulldogs have a tremendous backcourt in Kario Oquendo and Terry Roberts, so this will be no easy game for the Gators. Plus, I can’t imagine a loss to Mike White in year one taking over a bad Georgia program would do much for fans looking to get behind Florida basketball. We’ll see what happens Saturday!
That’s all folks, see you next week!