Vandy Rallies to Season Sweep of Gators

Saturday, March 4

Nashville, TN

2 PM

Florida Gators

Vanderbilt

Vanderbilt 7-1 forward Luke Kornet was a problem on both ends Saturday, as UF freshman Keith Stone found out.

Vandy Rallies to Season Sweep of Gators

Saturday, March 4, 2017 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry

Box Score

UF blew a 12-point second-half lead and was swept by the Commodores for the second straight year.

By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Just five 3-pointers.

That's half of what Vanderbilt, the top long-distance shooting team in the Southeastern Conference, averages per game and it equaled the fewest the Commodores had hit all season. For Florida, one of the nation's top defensive squads, that should have been good enough to to get out town with a big road win.

But the Gators weren't their normally sound defensive selves Saturday, especially in the closing minutes. Vandy didn't need the long ball to rally from 12 down in the second half. Not when the Commodores were getting straight-line drives for layups and hitting free throws down the stretch for a come-from-behind 73-71 victory over 12th-ranked UF and sweep of the season's series before 10,431 at Memorial Gym.

Senior forward Luke Kornet, in his final home appearance and with his team scraping for at-large NCAA Tournament bid, scored six of his game-high 24 points in the final two-plus minutes, hitting a game-tying tip-in and four free throws, the last coming with 12.1 seconds remaining to give Vandy a two-point lead.

At UF's end, senior guard Kasey Hill drove the length of the floor, but was hard off the glass with a layup attempt. KeVaughn Allen, trailing the play, crashed to try and grab the offensive rebound, but the ball caromed off his leg and out of bounds with six seconds to go. Commodores forward Joe Toye bounced two free throws with 1.5 seconds left, but guard Chris Chiozza's length-of-the-court heave at the buzzer wasn't close.

The loss was the second in three games for the Gators (24-7, 14-4), but had no impact on their standing relative to next week's SEC Tournament right back here in the Music City, but down the street at Bridgestone Arena. How it will impact UF's standing in the NCAA Tournament might be a different matter, though the Gators will have plenty to say about that as far as their performance in the league's postseason event.

That was not, however, on their minds Saturday.

"They're crushed," UF coach Mike White said of his players afterward. "They're playing hard. They're out there throwing around their bodies. We had 32 of the 40 minutes where we guarded at a really high level against a team that was really hungry coming into the game and is really difficult to defend. We just couldn't finish it."

Senior forward Canyon Barry came off the bench to score 15 points, with Allen, the sophomore shooting guard, pitching in 13 more, but scoring none over the final 27-plus minutes after starting the game 4-for-5 from the floor and 2-for-3 from the arc. Backup guard Chris Chiozza had 11 points and four assists, with Hill tallying 10 points, but five turnovers.

Vandy guard Riley LaChance scored 10 of his 13 points in the second half, including this easy layup with just 1:35 to play.

The Gators shot 47.7 percent for the game, but gave away 17 points off 13 turnovers and also sent the Commodores (17-14), the league's No. 1 free-throw shooting team, to the foul line 27 times. They went 14-for-19 in the second half, hitting nine straight at one point during the comeback.

"We've gotten turnover happy the last four or five games. We hurt our defense," White said. "Defensively, when we were set, our guys played their hearts out and did a lot of good things, but they got 17 [points] from us just throwing them the ball."

Nine of them the second half.

"It was a high stakes game for us," said Vandy senior guard Nolan Cressler, who had 13 points, six rebounds and three assists. "We had a lot to play for coming into this game and just before the game we talked about leaving it all out there. I think we really fought and we really pulled it together and got a huge win for us.

Florida led 54-42 inside 11 minutes to play and still by nine, 60-51, inside seven. Then something happened.

"We stopped playing," Hill said.

Stopped playing well, that is.

The Gators made just three of their final 10 shots and turned the ball over four times along the way. Meanwhile, the Commodores exploited UF's preference to play small ball in the front court in an effort to negate the home team's often-deadly perimeter game — which it did. Vandy, though, posted the 7-foot-1 Kornet with success. He finished 7-for-17 from the floor, only 2-for-8 from the arc, but converted eight of 10 free throws.

The Florida lead was seven, 63-56, with under six to go when Vandy scored nine unanswered points, the last seven coming from junior point guard Riley LaChance (13 points, 5 rebounds, 4 assists), who split the UF defense for a layup and lead with 3:23 remaining that amped up the home crowd. It was the Commodores' first lead since the nine-minute mark of the first half.

"Just no communication," Hill said. "We let them get some easy baskets, they got it going and fed off their crowd."

The Gators, though, got two free throws from Chiozza, plus a darting layup by Hill to retake a two-point lead with 2:35 remaining.

But Kornet tipped in a LaChance miss for another tie and after Allen had the ball stripped driving the lane, LaChance got into the teeth of the UF defense again for another layup with 1:35 to go and the lead. For good, as it turned out.

After playing defense so well for the bulk of the game, breakdowns on assignments and switches were the Gators' downfall late.

"You have to pick your poison against them," Barry said. "If you switch the pick and roll, then they post Luke Kornet on the [point guard]. If you don't switch it, you're in danger of playing out of rotation against a team that shoots the ball really well."

And if you surrender straight-line drives, you'll oftentimes be looking at layups.

Ultimately, that was the poison — along with turnovers — that killed the Gators' chances of winning a winnable road game in a very difficult place. Instead, UF lost for the fourth time in the last five trips to Memorial. White, amazingly, fell to 0-8 all-time in the building, with two losses as a player at Ole Miss, four as an assistant at Ole Miss, and the last two as Florida's head coach.

This had to hurt as much as any of them. Maybe more.

"Vanderbilt was more poised. They were more solid, both offensively and defensively," White said. "Two veteran teams. They played like a veteran team and we didn't play enough like one."