NASHVILLE -- By the time John Jenkins hit his game-high sixth 3-pointer, Brad Beal was willing to place the Vanderbilt guard in the same breath as his favorite NBA player.
“He’s like Ray Allen,” Beal said. “He’s always coming off another screen, and another screen and another screen. He’s a terrific shooter and he got hot.”
Led by Jenkins’ 22 points, the Commodores shot 50 percent behind the arc Tuesday night at Memorial Gym and pulled away from the Gators late for a 77-67 win.
While the season-high 12 triples Florida allowed came at the hands of the Southeastern Conference’s 3-point percentage leaders, Beal said some of the open looks and defensive breakdowns Vanderbilt enjoyed against UF were inexcusable.
“There was just stupidity,” he said. “Sometimes we were too caught up on the ball instead of finding Jenkins or finding (Jeffery) Taylor and guys were just knocking down threes. That was just our lack of awareness. You have to be aware on the court and know where the guys are.”
The Commodores, who shot 10.2 percentage points above their previous season average, were just the latest SEC team to take advantage of Florida from the 3-point line.
In the Gators’ previous 14 games, 11 other league opponents have bested their usual 3-point percentage against UF’s defense. The hot shooting nights have combined to drop Florida’s 3-point percentage defense to 35.6 for the season, which is 11th in the SEC.
“We figured out what they were doing,” said Taylor, who hit 4 of 8 from three. “We were quick, we were moving around fast, getting into the guys that we needed to cover and everybody just worked together.”
Though slowing down another team’s 3-point shooting relies heavily on its quality of shooter and frequency of attempts, Vanderbilt’s success around the perimeter looked hauntingly similar to what Kentucky was able to accomplish against Florida more than two weeks earlier.
The Wildcats shot a season-high 60 percent on 9-of-15 shooting from deep in their 20-point win on Feb. 7.
Kentucky hit three straight 3-pointers to close a frenetically paced first half. Florida coach Billy Donovan attributed the easy looks to missed assignments in transition.
He would echo the sentiment after the Gators struggled to switch from their full-court press to both zone and man-to-man defense against the Commodores.
“It was my fault for trying to change defenses,” Donovan said. “We got caught changing up in transition a few times, and Taylor and Jenkins torched us.”
Florida gave up double-digit 3-pointers for just the second time this season, with the only other instance coming in late December on an 11-of-21 shooting effort by Yale.
The Gators, on the other hand, have hit more than 10 threes in 19 of their 30 games and are the only team still ranked in the AP Top 25 besides Michigan to take more than 41 percent of its shots from 3-point range, according to KenPom.com. The Gators have taken 44.5 percent of their field goal attempts from beyond the arc, a figure that ranks seventh in the NCAA and is 11.5 percentage points higher than the national average.
Down the stretch, Donovan grew disappointed with his team’s shot selection as Florida used nine shots on 3-pointers in a just more than four-minute span starting at the 9:32 mark. Though the Gators made three, the Commodores still outscored Florida 14-9 during the stretch.
“We did a pretty solid job of either contesting the shots or taking them away [Tuesday],” Taylor said. “That’s pretty much why we won.”
Contact John Boothe at jboothe@alligator.org.
Florida freshman Brad Beal (23) said a series of mistakes and a lack of awareness allowed Vanderbilt to exploit the Gators’ defense for a season-high 12 made 3-pointers on Tuesday night.
