The Florida Gators never allowed things get out of control and kept things close until the second half, when they eventually regained the lead and never let up, winning 88-82 and moving to 18-7 (8-4 SEC) on the season. The Georgia Bulldogs started the game off well with a double-digit lead. Walter Clayton led the Gators with 21 points and two assists, as has been the case a lot lately. Noah Thomasson, a transfer from Niagara, had a huge game for Georgia with 26 points. It was never going to be easy for Florida because the Bulldogs had taken a week off to prepare for this game. Although things didn’t go as planned, they will be thrilled with
A steady 40 minutes was important for the Gators going into this game because, well, you can always count on Georgia to score runs. You would think the Bulldogs are simply losing every game because this was their sixth straight defeat, but that isn’t the case. In almost all of these defeats, they had held leads of ten points or more at some time. Against the Gators, they started off quickly and made nine of their ten field goal tries. Regretfully, the Bulldogs went over 10 minutes without a field goal in the second half, continuing their recent trend of being ice cold. Georgia’s predicted streakiness was matched by the Gators’ relentless performance, who
Georgia began to lose steam, but the Gators gradually rallied to win the match. When the Bulldogs took an early lead, it would have been simple for the Gators to let up on their effort in front of raucous supporters on the road. However, they didn’t, and they fought their way back into the game by maintaining their intensity, especially on the offensive boards. Gators are normally a really consistent team since they don’t rely too much on the three-point shot, which is especially helpful when playing a club like Georgia.
In the first half Florida struggled to get much going offensively until they went to the bench and put in freshman Thomas Haugh. Haugh hit three pure three-point shots right away and calmed things down for the Gators and he continued his excellent play in the second half defensively and on the glass finishing with a career-high 17 points and 7 rebounds. Coach Todd Golden wasn’t particularly happy with the play of starting frontcourt players Micah Handlogten and Tyrese Samuel who were getting exposed on the defensive end and Haugh managed himself much better particularly with perimeter defense, and the shotmaking on the other end secured his role in this game.
Haugh was out there for nearly all of the last ten minutes of a close game and there isn’t a bigger compliment from a coach than to be trusted in crunch time of a close game on the road. Joining him in crunch time was Alex Condon who also had a tremendous game off the bench with 10 points and much better interior defense than the Gators were getting from their starters. Closing out the game with two freshman in the frontcourt instead of two heralded transfers was not something you’d expect to see this deep in conference play and while there could be some concern about the play of Tyrese Samuel and Micah Handlogten, the positive side of things is that Thomas Haugh and Alex Condon were tremendous.
One area of improvement the Gators will be looking at in practice is their baseline out of bounds defense. Georgia head coach Mike White is known for his ability to draw up baseline out of bounds plays and they embarrassed Florida in this situations with a number of wide open layups and catch and shoot threes and it was one way the Bulldogs were able to get easy points in a game where their half court offense wasn’t exactly humming. This hasn’t been a major area of strength for Florida this season but it hasn’t been exploited all that much until this game, but this could be what leads to the Gators spending some more time on these special situations. Looking back on these plays there were a number of Florida players who made errors with execution and communication, so there is plenty to be worked on when the team looks back on the film.
With Georgia having had a week off to prepare, this game could have been a trap, and the Bulldogs’ early surge appeared to be giving the Gators serious trouble. Luckily, Florida never gave up and kept up their relentless offensive rebounding and reliance on their shooting guards. In the end, the inevitable Georgia drought was sufficient for the Gators to retake the lead in the game. There were some really bad defensive plays by Florida, especially against a club like Georgia that has terrible offensive stats this season, but in the end, as they consistently do in games where they are favored, the Gators have managed to prevail. While there wasn’t much resume value to this quad-2 match, a defeat would have been highly damaging, and the Gators have avoided those kinds of losses all season long and now again. When the Gators play Alabama on Wednesday, things will become considerably more difficult.
