I have to say that when Condon rebounded his own shot in the second half and scored, then ran down the court to rebound Kentucky’s missed shot when he just reached the paint, it has been a while since we have had a fast agile kid under the boards. The kid scored ten points, the only big to reach double figures for Florida. He will get better on threes and ft’s and the coaches will help him with jump hooks, using the glass on his shots etc. Condon is better than Andrew DeClerk, who helped us to our first final four. You better believe Kentucky knows who he is. I wish he would have shot a few more threes when open and the coaches will find ways to help him get inside to score in our half court offense. Our problems are hero ball when we get in the half court due to the other team being setup already. AKA is right that we need to exploit our size advantage and Condon/Handlogten/Haugh all need to work inside, but when open from three, work on hittin these. Kentucky sat back on our bigs due to them hardly ever using these shots!
Three out of our four losses (UVA by 3, Baylor by 4 and UK by 2) have been by four points or less. Our FT % in those games was 73%, 78% and 62% respectively. I agree that we have struggled at the FT line for much of the season, but after 14 games played, the only time it contributed to a loss was yesterday against UK. But there will be more losses like the UK loss to come if we do not become more consistent from the charity stripe.
He was cold but Riley was hot. Free throw misses and hand fouls were the difference. Overall I thought the team played well. Do you think we could hire Canyon Berry to teach underhand free throws? If this team could average 75%, they could beat anyone.
Regardless of whether it was by design or not . . . 50/16 is WAY too lopsided with our players . . . and if the team is not playing the game the way the coach wants, it's the coach's job to call time-out(s) and make them play differently.
LMAO you saying this after being presented with per 40 numbers shows you truly have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe stick to track
r.i.p. Florida's 6-game winning streak (in December). r.i.p Florida's 6-game home-winning streak (6-1 in O'Dome). next game: at #22 Ole Miss (13-1, 0-1). Ole Miss just had their first loss of the season in SEC play to #5 Tennessee (64-90). The Gators need to get back on the winning track again!
Physical shortcomings are triggered by a player's mental state of mind. Very simply during winning time of the last three minutes, Kentucky felt they would win, while our guys were not so sure. Getting over that mental hump is a difficult thing to do. Physically we were more than a match for Kentucky, but once again, during winning time we just did not measure up.
I agree with a lot of the criticisms posted on this thread, but we all need to pump the brakes a little. We need to realize that this is the first game of SEC play and beating Kentucky at home was not one of our season goals. As much as I have harped on us playing bad defense, I thought today was better. You can't really say it was all bad defensively because we gave up 87 points because some of that is due to the pace of play. This team has talent. More talent than coach Golden has ever had before, so we are gonna need to give him a minute to figure out how to manage all the pieces. Cal has been doing this for many years with top talent. It is old hat to him and many UK fans still think he mismanages players minutes. That said I want Aberdeen and Rishwain to get 10 minutes off the bench. I want Cal (and the other opposing coaches) to go crazy trying to figure out all our combinations, and it will help to keep Pullin and Clayton fresh for crunch time if the game is close.
Our over-reliance on the 3 ball has been a concern for me, all season. It seems to go hand-in-hand with our scoring droughts from earlier games. We’ve got to learn how to manufacture points, consistently, when the three ball isn’t falling. We’ve also got to be smarter in knowing when to stop shooting them & work the ball inside.
Totally with you, especially with the football program. I do see a glimmer of hope on the basketball side, though. Our status as an egghead school doesn't prevent us from having a great hoops program again. Many egghead schools have great success in hoops. Perhaps the NIL money is better served going towards becoming an elite hoops program again. Far fewer players to buy and we can pay them more too.
I was impressed yesterday, even with the loss. This is a really good UK team. They played even with them and very easily could have won. This UK team would have blew out our previous teams, going back to the year after the elite 8. It's much easier to go back to the few things you did wrong and improve on them as opposed to being overwhelmed with talent and skill and getting killed. Now, the challenge is to go to Oxford and bring a little more. Ole Miss looked liked little kids last night in Knoxville. I think we can hammer them if we show up with intensity.
Ole Miss is going to give us some trouble. They are very active in the passing lanes and have good guard play and two 7 footers who can negate some of our advantage in the paint. The SEC is stacked this season.
Thought the game plan was what we have seen all year, they chose to take away the inside game hoping we shot a low percentage from 3. Richard picked a bad time to go cold, he’s been pretty hot lately. I don’t mind the high number of 3s, most of them were open and not forced. We took what they were giving us, just have to make shots. As bad as the FT shooting was, and it was bad, there was really not much gained by Kentucky because they shot pretty poorly too.
I DO think it is an easy to improve, if not totally fix. Kentucky shot 71%, we shot 61%. right? The NBA average, based on what I found, is right at 75%. Many players shoot better than 90%. I guess the NBA coaches, having spent all of that money on the players, either "improved" or "fixed" the problem. I think we can imagine how. Not being a smart ass or anything.
I’d have to go back & look at our game-to-game percentages, but I’d bet yesterday, we were below our season averages. Our bigs are not consistently good at the line. I know they work on them in practice, everyone does. Some guys just never quite develop a good FT stroke, as strange as that sounds. Trust me, I’m falling out of my chair yesterday when we went 1-2 or missed the front end of a one-n-one. As the game progressed it was exactly where I wanted us to be. We just failed miserably closing it out at the line ( there were other issues too). Losing ZP for just that short period of time killed our offensive rhythm while he was out. I think we’re going to find ourselves in many more games like yesterday so I’m hoping they can do something at practice that improves our FT performance during games. I’ve seen guys who work very hard at it, but still struggle in games.
As Billy D said in his podcast, in recruiting he looked for players with heart and passion, because he couldn't put that in a player. When he was recruiting Al Horford, he mentioned Al sitting in the bleachers alone crying after his team lost a relatively unimportant AAU game. But winning was everything to Horford. This Kentucky game, the past six or so basketball seasons, and the past 12 football seasons, show a lack of heart and passion in so many of our players. They have accepted losing. It doesn't kill them like it would an Al Horford, or a Joakim Noah, or a Tim Tebow, or an Emmitt Smith , or a Danny Wuerfell, or a Steve Spurrier. It's a mindset. All we had to do to beat Kentucky was be good. We didn't have to be great. But we couldn't even be good, as reflected in the play of several players. And in big games like that, at home, you would like to think some good players with a will to win would step up and actually be great. Instead, many weren't even mediocre. So they lost. Re: academics. Please don't think the fact that the student body at UF has a lot of good students means that the football and basketball team have a lot of good students-because they don't. Our athletic department invests countless resources just to keep them academically eligible, because they are not good students. Hypothetically speaking--of course--are you suggesting that if you and all of your classmates at UF had been complete dumbasses, that the gator football and basketball teams then would have won more games?
Maybe since DeClercq. Andrew DeClercq was an absolute deer running the floor. Condon might not have the same upside on D as AD but I see a lot more offensive upside than AD. I don't expect that Condon would be able to chase down a guard on a fast break and swat the layup attempt away like AD could do. AD was a total beast on the glass. Condon might get there. I hope so.
