The Gators are on the verge of their first three-game losing streak in nearly two years.
What once looked like the Southeastern Conference’s clear-cut second-best team is now prepping for a potential No. 4 seed in the league tournament.
Right now, by its own coach’s admission, Florida is banged up. Will Yeguete is gone for the season, and the rest of the rotation is still muddled in a laundry list of minor ankle and knee injuries.
It feels like the perfect time for a wounded animal analogy. But I can’t shake what we all saw Tuesday in Memorial Gym.
Even in a 10-point loss to Vanderbilt, Florida didn’t look like a horse ridden hard and put away wet, a team in free fall in danger of enduring a season-ending slump ahead of its second showdown with No. 1 Kentucky this weekend.
Instead, the five-headed, 3-point-shooting monster Billy Donovan ran onto the floor for the second half appeared to be a different creature altogether.
If possible, one of the NCAA’s best 3-point shooting teams became even more dangerous.
In the eight minutes and 46 seconds Donovan played a small four-guard lineup coupled with forward Erik Murphy — who is second on the team in 3-point percentage — the Gators racked up 21 points to begin a scoring surge that helped grab the lead from the Commodores.
In the remaining 31:14 of the game, Florida scored just 46 points.
With the Gators producing more than a third of their 67 total points in the four-guard lineup, Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings was understandably flustered at seeing the nation’s leading team in made 3-pointers add a new wrinkle to its offense.
“[They] had four guards [on the court], and I said, ‘The heck with that,’” Stallings said. “We had our standard lineup in there, so we put our four-best ball-handlers out there with Festus [Ezeli].”
The guard-heavy rotation is even more intriguing for extended use when considering Florida has turned over the ball an average of 14 times per game in its seven losses this season.
However, using primarily four guards against the Commodores, the Gators went just more than 15 minutes in the second half without a turnover.
While playing a lineup filled with nothing but 3-point shooters has been a long-fabled dream of many Gators fans, it has been little-used since the preseason due to the unexpected emergence of Yeguete as the team’s best post defender.
Though Donovan has gone to the new rotation almost out of necessity after Yeguete suffered a broken foot last week, its effectiveness against Vanderbilt showed it can give the Gators a much-needed offensive boost as tournament season begins.
The only factor working against Florida will be time.
Selection Sunday for the NCAA Tournament is next weekend, leaving the Gators a maximum of four more games should they advance to the SEC Tournament Championship to further implement and improve their four-guard offense.
“[The Gators are] trying to find their deal right now and that’s not an easy thing to do in a short period of time,” Stallings said.
Regardless of how UF closes the regular season, Donovan has made sure the 3-point-heavy Gators will still have a shooter’s chance in any single-elimination game going forward.
Contact John Boothe at jboothe@alligator.org.
