GAINESVILLE, Fla. —
Mike White and his Florida basketball players, assistants and support staff members stood spread out on the practice gym Friday afternoon for a team meeting. For what it was worth, they all practiced good social distancing.
There would be no hugs, handshakes or fist bumps afterward.
"Guys," White said. "This is the last time we'll meet as a team."
Then it was over.
Sort of like the Southeastern Conference Tournament the day before. White had a similar and equally surreal and solemn moment with his squad at the Renaissance hotel in downtown Nashville, Tenn. The tournament was canceled Thursday morning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, about three hours before the Gators were to face Georgia in second-round play. The NCAA Tournament followed suit later that afternoon. The 2019-20 Gators — like hundreds of teams and thousands of athletes in the country — were left to come to terms with an empty and lingering sense of unfinished business.
"It's weird," UF grad-transfer forward
Kerry Blackshear Jr. said on his way out the facility door. "This season will never have closure."
Gators coach Mike White addresses his team one last time Friday before the official announcement that the SEC was shuttering athletic operations through at least April 15 due to the coronavirus outbreak.
To recap, the Gators entered the '19-20 campaign with expectations as high as they were unrealistic. Over the course of the season, UF morphed into a team that basically played a rotation of nine players, with eight of them either freshmen and sophomores, plus Blackshear, who arrived last summer with All-Atlantic Coast Conference credentials by way of Virginia Tech.
The Gators opened the season ranked No. 6 in the
Associated Press poll, fell out of the rankings by the end of November, looked completely lost at times on offense early on, flashed encouraging spurts at times in SEC play, took steps both forward and backward during the league campaign, and ultimately finished with a 19-12 record — against one of the most difficult schedules in the country — that would have insured the program a fourth straight appearance in the NCAA Tournament.
Along the way, UF captured its first regular-season tournament title in a decade by winning the Charleston (S.C.) Classic. The Gators obliterated Providence by 32 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., staged two of the greatest comebacks in the program history in rallying from 21 down to beat Alabama and 22 down to defeat Georgia, clobbered No. 4 Auburn by 22 on national TV, and christened "Billy Donovan Court" with a victory over Vanderbilt on its dedication night, with the former icon coach in the house. Those were among the season's highlights.
The lowlights? Losing a sixth straight to Florida State in the second game of the season (at home, no less) was an early downer. The Seminoles, of course, went on to win the ACC and finish the season ranked fourth nationally. In its four non-league defeats, UF averaged just 58.5 points. There were a couple ugly road losses at Missouri and Ole Miss, two teams that finished near the bottom of the conference standings, as well as frustrating home collapses against Mississippi State (up 16 in the first half) and sixth-ranked Kentucky (up 18 with 12 minutes to go). The latter, of course, came on Blackshear's "Senior Day" and would be the final game of the season.
But who knew?
"When you're younger and with your childhood friends, you don't think about that time when you're playing and it turns out to be the last time you ever play with those guys. You just don't. You just get on with your life, you know?" sophomore shooting guard
Noah Locke said. "When you're older, you know there's going to be a last one, but this just came out of nowhere. It's tough, for sure."
In that last group meeting Friday, White reminded the team of something he often referenced during this season, as well as past seasons; the notion of taking advantage of every opportunity because those opportunities are so precious, so rare, so fleeting. Sometimes, they're even taken away.
"For me, I'm heartbroken," Locke said. "I really felt like this team could have done some big things in the postseason. And for me, personally? I thought I was playing really well of late. I wanted to build on that. We all did. It's just sad that we won't get the chance to fully max out as a team."
So how will the '19-20 season be remembered?
"I thought throughout the year this team came further probably than any team I've had in terms of our chemistry, our offensive selflessness, with the way these guys learned how to play with one another. They made the biggest improvement in the middle of a season than any group I've had," said White, who in the shortened schedule fell one victory shy of becoming just the fourth coach in SEC history to win at least 20 games in each of his first five seasons in the league. "Early on, it was tough to watch film of us offensively, but then in conference play we led the league in field-goal percentage and 3-point percentage. Offensively, we figured it out a little bit. We were never as great as we needed to be defensively, but who's to say that we weren't going to be what we needed to be in the postseason. We thought we had a little bit of a run in us, but we'll never know."
Grad-transfer forward Kerry Blackshear, who finished second on the team in scoring and led the Gators in rebounding, is the lone starter who for certain will be back with the team next season, but more roster upheavel is expected.
After addressing the team Friday, White and his staff had exit interviews with individual players to address the future, which like the present remains very much influx. The Gators, though, are certain to lose the 6-foot-10, 240-pound Blackshear, who finished second on the team in scoring (12.8 points per game) and first in rebounding (7.5 per game). On Monday, fourth-year junior
Dontay Bassett, who played sparingly this season and is on pace to graduate in the coming months,
entered the NCAA transfer portal, where he joined fourth-year junior center
Gorjok Gak, who quit the team in January.
More attrition could be coming, but it will take some time to play out.
The most obvious questions surround sophomore point guard
Andrew Nembhard and freshman wing
Scottie Lewis, both of whom are expected to go through the NBA's underclassmen evaluation process. Nembhard, who was third on the team in scoring at 11.2 points per game and second in the SEC in assists (5.8 pg), went through the process last year, so he'll know exactly what to expect and be more prepared for it. Which way Lewis, the defensive maven who averaged 8.5 points and 3.6 rebounds, goes will depend on the feedback he gets. For now, neither he nor Nembhard show up in the majority of current mock drafts.
And neither does sophomore forward
Keyontae Johnson.
All Johnson did this season was make the biggest across-the-board leap of any UF player on his way to first-team All-SEC honors. He led the Gators in scoring (14.0 ppg), finished second in rebounding (7.1), had eight double-doubles, shot 54.4 percent from the floor, 38.0 from the 3-point line and knocked down nearly 77 percent of his free throws. Johnson also had nearly twice as many assists (88) as turnovers (49) and led the team with 38 steals. As of now, Johnson is leaning toward returning, but he certainly could reconsider once he sits down, talks things over with his family and perhaps opts for the underclassmen eval, as well. There's no downside to doing so.
Worth considering: Exactly nothing about the NBA Draft (or the NBA, for that matter) is certain right now, with the evaluation process — and its intense travel schedule — paralyzed like everything else across the country.
Freshman forward/guard Scottie Lewis, the 2019 McDonald's All-American, averaged 8.5 points, 3.6 rebounds, shot 36.1 percent from the floor and led the team blocked shots over his 30 games, including 22 starts.
Locke, who led the SEC in 3-point shooting percentage (43.2 percent overall and 48.1 in league play), will be back for his junior season, along with (presumably) a quartet of rising sophomores in guards
Tre Mann (5.3 ppg) and
Ques Glover (4.4 ppg), forward
Omar Payne (3.8 ppg, 3.6 rpg) and center
Jason Jitoboh (1.8 ppg, 1.3 rpg), with all of their roles significantly increasing next season.
A pair of athletic transfers already on hand, forward
Anthony Duruji and guard
Tyree Appleby, sat out the '19-20 season per NCAA rules and have a year of practicing in the system. They both will be impact players next year, each already with more than 60 games of Division-I experience. Duruji averaged 12.2 points and 6.2 rebounds as a sophomore at Louisiana Tech last year, while Appleby tallied 17.2 points, 3.7 rebounds and 5.6 assists at Cleveland State, where he is credited with the only triple-double in school history. Guard
Alex Klatsky sat out the season as a walk-on. He'll be back, also.
Florida has signed three incoming players. The addition of wing Samson Ruzhentsev, a top-50 prospect from the Hamilton Heights prep school in Tennessee and one of the elite pure shooters in his class, guard Niels Lane from New Jersey, and 6-foot-8, 215-pound forward Osayi Osifo, a top-five national junior-college prospect, will provide an influx of athleticism at three positions. More signees (or a grad-transfer) could be added if any current players opt for the early NBA route or explore a transfer.
The long-range hopes, as far as White is concerned, is a '20-21 team that is more suited to pressing, extending and playing a more up-tempo brand of basketball, but that's a ways off. And, frankly, with no beginning in sight.
In fact, the Gators are still coming to terms with the recent (and all-too-abrupt) ending.
"We were playing our best basketball at the end of the year, and I say that, obviously, having blown a big game, up at home against one of the best teams in the country," White said. "This [UF] team had confidence it was going to do some damage in the SEC Tournament and the NCAA Tournament. We didn't get an opportunity to do that and we're not the only team to experience that disappointment. But, obviously, but it was necessary. We all understand that."
That doesn't make it any easier to accept, but give Blackshear, the Orlando native, credit for finding a sliver of a silver lining. This wasn't the collegiate swan-song season he anticipated. His "Senior Day" was cut short by a wrist injury that forced him to watch helplessly from the bench during the second-half meltdown against Kentucky. For what it's worth (not much now), Blackshear was cleared to take the floor against Georgia in the SEC Tournament. It just wasn't meant to be.
For that, Blackshear smiled, then shrugged.
"At least I got to play at my dream school."
