Gators Rock Arkansas With Their Best Overall Game of the Season

Finally, Todd Golden got the game he’s been looking for all season long. Sure, it took 16 games for it to happen, but Florida’s 90-68 win over Arkansas couldn’t have come at a better time than Saturday afternoon at the O-Dome before a sold out crowd of 10,445.

 “My goodness, it was an incredible environment and you know obviously after a tough start in the league fans can become fickle but our fans were not that and they did an incredible job of being present, being loud and one of the best homecourt advantages in college basketball here in Gainesville,”Golden said after the Gators (11-5, 1-2 SEC) notched their first Southeastern Conference win of the season while keeping Arkansas (9-7, 0-3 SEC) winless in league play.

This was a must win for the Gators, who go on the road twice next week (at Tennessee Tuesday night; at Missouri next Saturday). A week ago the Gators dropped their SEC opener to Kentucky, a game they expected to win but allowed to slip through their fingers in the final five minutes. Wednesday night, they were blown out by Ole Miss in Oxford, one of those if it can go wrong it did go wrong kind of games. The Gators were down four (44-40) in the first half of that one, but Ole Miss cranked it up in the second and won the game by 18.

To come back from that kind of disappointing start, Golden needed a focused, relentless effort. He got what he termed Florida’s best and most complete game of the season.

“We played on the road a lot in preseason, ups and downs, and I think the key especially in this league – and I actually talked to Jimmy Dykes (ESPN color analyst) about this yesterday,” Golden said. “He was like you just can’t let a bad loss bleed into and set in. That’s the key in this league: you’ve got to be able to bounce back. You’re gonna lose games, and this is the second-best league in America, there’s plenty of top-25 teams, tough environments to play, and the fact that we were able to come back and play the way we did after that game at Ole Miss, which was definitely our worst effort of the year, I think says a lot about the character of the guys in our program.”

Digging out of an 0-3 hole in the SEC, probably second only to the Big 12 as the toughest league in the country, is like scaling a cliff in that you can’t afford a single  misstep and that’s only half the problem. The other half is what that kind of start to conference play can do to crater confidence. If the O-Dome crowd had any doubts about Florida’s confidence, Florida’s first five minutes were encouraging. The Gators moved the ball offensively, scrambled defensively and picked up floor burns to build a 13-7 lead.

Then came Tyrese Samuel with a doubt-eraser when he launched a 3-pointer from the top of the key. For a 6-10, 239-pounder whose previous two games produced a combined 14 points and nine rebounds, a 23-foot shot might have seemed questionable judgment, but Samuel shot with such confidence. When it found the bottom of the net with 14:29 remaining in the half Samuel had the look of a volume shooter who nails 3-balls for a living.   

The 3-pointer was simply sign of things to come for Samuel, who finished the game with 17 points on 8-13 shooting to go with 11 rebounds, one assist, one steal and one blocked shot. Samuel hit a couple of mid-range jumpers, had a couple of dunks including one on an alley-oop on a fast break. He dominated around the basket while he was in the game, quite a change from the two previous games. He looked like the Tyrese Samuel who had six double-doubles in the first 15 games of the season.   

“It was a confidence booster and I needed that,” Samuel said.

Samuel wasn’t the only Gator that needed a confidence boost. Will Richard, who combined for seven points while hitting just 1-9 from the 3-point line in the losses to Kentucky and Ole Miss, was good for 13. Riley Kugel, who played only four minutes in the loss to Ole Miss, returned to form with 20 points, five rebounds, a blocked shot and two steals.

Kugel had three power dunks on the night but none as monstrous as the throw down off a straight line drive with 11:25 left in the half that gave the Gators a 25-9 lead. He had a 2-handed jam off the baseline with 55 seconds left in the first half and a 2-hand dunk finish on a fast break with 9:48 left in the game.

The dunks were spectacular, but he elevates so well that they are almost expected. What wasn’t expected was the beat-the-shot clock heave from just in front of the Florida bench a split second before the buzzer sounded. It was an odd angle

Kugel had it going so well that he threw up a shot just in front of the Florida bench with the shot clock about to strike zero. Kugel was moving to his left so the shot was at an odd angle as he went airborne but it didn’t matter. The ball banked in for an 81-56 UF lead with 5:06 left in the game. .

It was that kind of day for the sophomore from Orlando.  

“We were joking a bit – I shouldn’t say joking – when he hit that crazy shot-clock three, and I just went up to him and said ‘That’s the basketball gods right there, brother,’” Golden said.

Three key players, each of them responding to a poor outing by getting the job done when teammates needed it most had plenty to do with the Gators looking like they’re very capable of beating any team on the schedule the rest of the way. Samuel, Richard and Kugel were supplemented Zyon Pullin (15 points, four rebounds, eight assists, 1 steal) and Walter Clayton Jr. (11 points, 3 rebounds, 2 assists) along with a relentless effort on the backboards. Florida, the No. 1 rebounding team in the country, lived up to the billing by outrebounding Arkansas, 48-31, with 15 offensive rebounds leading to 17 second chance points.  

The Gators shot 49.3 percent (33-67) overall and 36 percent from the 3-point line (36 percent). The 3-point percentage is a bit deceptive since the Gators missed their last four long after the game had been decided.

The Razorbacks, known for their in-your-face man defense, hoped to find an edge by going unconventional with a zone. If it caught the Gators by surprise, the shock didn’t last very long.

“Yeah, honestly we didn’t prepare for it much, but I feel good about our zone attack,” Golden said. “I think our personnel is good for zone. We have good, intelligent frontcourt players that are skilled and can pass and can read and make decisions, and, you know, we’ve got enough guys that can shoot it to where you have to be mindful of where Will, Walt, ZP, Riley are on the perimeter.

“So sometimes it catches you off-guard, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a successful way to guard us for 40 minutes. Maybe it can steal a possession or two here or there, but, you know, the biggest key – and we didn’t do a good job early when we saw the zone – is you can’t turn the ball over. You know, you can’t turn the ball over, we did that a couple times, but in the second half we were pretty clean against the zone with no turnovers.”

The zone was pretty much a spur-of-the moment decision by Arkansas coach Eric Musselman to see if it could shake up the way the Razorbacks have been playing defense lately. In their first two SEC losses, Arkansas gave up 83 to Auburn and 76 to Georgia. Musselman’s teams are known for high pressure, in-your-face defense that forces a lot of bad shots, hardly the case lately.

So Musselman gambled with a change, in theory a good idea but in practice a bad decision.

"We’re not guarding anyone 1-on-1 so the thought process was to put a zone in yesterday to try to help us with dribble drives,” Musselman said. “It helped for a little, thought it was going to be a change of pace and maybe slowed Florida down. But just as in any zone or man, you’ve got to be able to guard the guy in your area that you were assigned to whether it’s man or zone.”

Florida, on the other hand, responded to the two-game prolonged defensive lapse with perhaps its best effort of the season. Defensively, the Gators showed up. Kentucky hung 87 on the Gators. Ole Miss lit them up for 103. Arkansas managed 68 on 23-61 shooting with only 5-15 coming from the 3-point line. The Razorbacks managed only 10-28 on layups.

The Gators have been playing fairly well defensively in the first halves of games recently, but they’ve slacked off a bit in the second half. That was a point of emphasis in practice when the Gators came back from the loss at Ole Miss.

“In practice, Coach kept on saying that we let up 50 points in the second half so he made that an emphasis,” Samuel said. “So, our goal was to go out there and make sure that doesn't happen again and it didn't happen and we came out with a win so that was most definitely an emphasis this week.”

One of the leading indicators that the Gators were locked in defensively was the way the Gators fought for those 50-50 balls, when the team that hustles the most tends to come away with possession. The Gators stole a few possessions diving on the floor or outjumping the Razorbacks to come away with loose balls.

Golden had very few reasons to complain about the defensive effort.

“In the second half, I just thought our communication was much better, I thought our ball-screen coverage was much better, and over the course of both halves I thought our ability to get to 50-50 balls was the best today that it’s been all year,” Golden said. “ZP started by getting on the floor early for one, Will and ‘Rese, Riley got a huge one in front of our bench, and those are just such momentum plays, and the way I think about those, it’s a point. Every time you get one of those it’s a point, and we definitely won the 50-50 battle tonight, another area that improved.”   

The Gators played as well as they’ve played all season long in every phase of the game. This was the complete game Golden knew the Gators had in them, but he needed to see them put it all together. That they did it in response to adverse circumstances made the win all the sweeter.

Now comes the tough part, putting a second consecutive complete game together, this time against a top ten opponent (Tennessee) that went on the road (to Georgia) and came from 10-down with a 15-1 run at the end to come away with a win. Although Arkansas isn’t the caliber team as Tennessee, the approach will have to be the same to come away with a win.

“We’ve got to go on the road, play with poise, not let the environment take our team over and take care of the ball and just do the winning things that we do today," Golden said.

SEC basketball

Saturday’s scores: FLORIDA (11-5, 1-2 SEC) 90, Arkansas (9-7, 0-3 SEC) 68; No. 5 Tennessee (12-4, 2-1 SEC) 85, Georgia (12-4, 2-1 SEC) 79; Texas A&M (10-6, 1-2 SEC) 97, No. 6 Kentucky (12-3, 2-1 SEC) 92, OT; No. 16 Auburn (14-2, 3-0 SEC) 93, LSU (10-6, 2-1 SEC) 78; Alabama (11-5, 3-0 SEC) 82, Mississippi State (12-4, 1-2 SEC) 74; Ole Miss (15-1, 2-1 SEC) 69, Vanderbilt (5-11, 0-3 SEC) 56; South Carolina (14-2, 2-1 SEC) 71, Missouri (8-8, 0-3 SEC) 69, OT;

Tuesday’s games: FLORIDA (11-5, 1-2 SEC) at No. 5 Tennessee (12-4, 2-1 SEC); Missouri (8-8, 0-3 SEC) at Alabama (11-5, 3-0 SEC); Georgia (12-4, 2-1 SEC) at South Carolina (14-2, 2-1 SEC); Texas A&M (10-6, 1-2 SEC) at Arkansas (9-7, 0-3 SEC)

Wednesday’s games: Mississippi State (12-4, 1-2 SEC) at No. 6 Kentucky (12-3, 2-1 SEC); No. 16 Auburn (14-2, 3-0 SEC) at Vanderbilt (5-11, 0-3 SEC); Ole Miss (15-1, 2-1 SEC) at LSU (10-6, 2-1 SEC)