Gators huddle up around center John Egbunu during Tuesday night's loss to No. 5 Duke at Madison Square Garden.
Gators Looking in Mirror as They Look Toward FSU
Saturday, December 10, 2016 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry
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UF is stressing more accountability, especially on the defensive glass and ball security.
By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Accountability.
It's a word that is tossed around a lot in sports. Coaches want players to be accountable. Teammates hold each other accountable. Some players openly ask for their coaches to make them accountable. But what does it really mean?
The simplest answer?
"Just doing your job," Florida junior center John Egbunu said.
By definition, accountability is an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility of one's actions. In sports (and we're obviously talking basketball here), it also means accepting the consequences that come when one's job is not performed.
Take the Gators, for example. They're a very good team, but if they're going to become the team they aspire to be — one capable of competing for a Southeastern Conference championship — they'll have to address the weaknesses most at the heart of undermining their progress.
On offense, it's turnovers. On defense, it's rebounding.
In the aftermath of Tuesday night's 84-74 loss to fifth-ranked Duke, a defeat brought about by some ill-timed turnovers and yielded offensive boards that became second-chance points, UF coach Mike White and his players had some honest dialogue about accountability. When the team next convened for practice Thursday — with an eye toward Sunday's showdown between the No. 21 Gators (7-2) and rival Florida State (9-1) at Tucker Center — White went back to his old days as a player at Ole Miss and borrowed a tactic used his former, Rob Evans.
Each time a player makes a mistake — be it a poor pass, a fumbled rebound or missed defensive assignment — he is called out by name, informed of the miscue and replaced on the floor.
No, it's not an exercise in public shaming, but it has a way of getting a guy's attention.
"I think it's good," sophomore guard KeVaughn Allen said. "It'll help us learn why we did what we did, make us want to play harder and try to fix the mistake we made."
Examples:
* Sophomore center Kevarrius Hayes admittedly missed a block-out against Duke that forward Amile Jefferson turned into one of his 15 rebounds and deposited into the basket for two of his 24 points. When Hayes missed a block-out at practice, he heard his name and was replaced.
* Senior forward Canyon Barry bounces back between the shooting guard and small forward positions. When playing the former, when a shot goes up on offense, he's responsible to help get floor balance by retreating on defense in the event of break. Barry, though, made the mental error at the time of thinking he was still playing forward. Instead, he crashed the glass to hunt the rebound, which left the floor unbalanced. Out he went.
* Against Duke, Egbunu pointed a finger at himself for not communicating well enough on defense on some possession or two. In practice, it cost him.
"I feel like it works. Kind of makes things more realistic because there's a price to pay for not doing your job," Hayes said. "If we practice it now, there won't be any surprises come game time. It also makes us more accountable. If you want to be on the court and trying to help your team, you can't be hurting your team at the same time."
Said Barry: "We're going back to basics a little bit. As long as we do what coach has been preaching to us since the beginning of the season, we'll play better as a team and that will translate to more wins."
And Egbunu: "The last game, unfortunately, a lot of those mistakes were about our lack of focus and attention to detail. It hurt us. By doing this, I think it can help us get better at those aspects of the game."
Forward Devin Robinson gets a supporting hand from teammate Kevarrius Hayes during the Duke game.
The Seminoles, with their average victory margin of a whopping 18.8 points, rank seventh in the country in offensive efficiency. They have a phenomenal backcourt in Dwayne Bacon (16.7 points per game) and point guard Xavier Rathan-Mayes (9.1 ppg) that gave the Gators fits last year in Gainesville when Bacon hit jumper with just over four seconds left for a 73-71 win. Down low, FSU is one of the biggest teams in the country, with a pair of 7-footers, but also a heralded 6-10 freshman in Jonathan Isaac (15.1 points, 7.3 rebounds per game), who is making nearly 59 percent of his field goals the floor and 44.4 from the 3-point line.
As a team, the Seminoles are shooting 51.1 percent, including 35.5 from deep.
"Defensively, they're the longest, fastest, quickest, most athletic defense I think, arguably, that we'll play this year; the second-biggest team, I think, numbers-wise in college basketball," White said. "They can throw 7-footers at you, 6-foot-10 long [power forwards] that can switch on the guards. They're really playing hard. They're pressuring even more than a year ago, pressing even more."
The Gators are among the best in the nation at defensive efficiency (9th), but unsecured rebounds on the defensive end or live-ball turnovers on the offensive end will be deadly against a team as athletic and deep (13 players averaging double-figure minutes) as the Seminoles.
Especially, on the road.
Starting Sunday, those defensive rebounding numbers (UF ranks 275th out of 348 Division I teams) inching upward. And while UF ranks 39th nationally in turnovers (just 11.4 per game), the Gators tend to get loose with the ball at the most inconvenient times. Their assist-to-turnover ratio is 192nd.
"We're pitifully ranked in those areas and it's holding us back," Barry said. "If we clean them up, it'll translate to more wins."
More accountability, also.
As junior forward Devin Robinson shouted Saturday as he boarded the team bus to Tallahassee, "Play hard! And do your job!"
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