UF walk-on Jack May (right) puts a consoling arm around teammate Phaldrous Fleming Jr. as the final seconds of the Florida season (and several UF careers) tick away Sunday in Cincinnati.
Gators' Season X'd Out in Cincinnati
Sunday, March 20, 2022 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry
CINCINNATI — The numbers on the stat sheet, as the saying goes, were what they were … and they weren't good.
Anyone who watched Florida's 72-56 loss Sunday at Xavier in the second round of the National Invitational Tournament was painfully aware of how and why the outcome came about. The Gators certainly were. That's why Al Pinkins, their interim coach, spent no time talking to his players about horrendous 3-point shooting, poor shot selection, defense, rebounds, turnovers and all the things that contributed to season-ending defeat at Cintas Center. Nope. The moment was much bigger than that.
"I didn't really talk a lot of basketball," Pinkins after the conclusion to a 20-14 season. "I talked life with these guys."
On that subject, the team had much to discuss.
Last week, the Gators underwent a seismic upheaval when Coach Mike White resigned after seven seasons and headed for Georgia, leaving the current coaching staff in limbo. Now, with the season officially over, eight seniors were set to go their separate ways while a handful of the leftover players looked to Monday night's face-to-face meeting with their next coach, Todd Golden, via the University of San Franciso, after which they'll assess their respective futures.
So that 22-percent second half of shooting, including a 1-for-19 display from beyond the 3-point line, while pivotal to the game's outcome, didn't seem all that important at the time. Not to anyone in the melancholy visitors' locker room.
"Our season is over and that sucks," senior forward Colin Castleton. "For a lot of these guys, it was their last year, so you have to look at what's next as a new opportunity and new chapter in everybody's book."
Florida players and coaches embrace during the final moments of Sunday's loss at Xavier.
The official score book from Sunday will show Xavier had five players in double-figure scoring, led by guard Nate Johnson's 16 points and five rebounds, and shot 49.1 percent as a team despite going just 4-for-20 from the 3-point line and committing 19 turnovers. The Musketeers (20-13) made up for their shortcomings by knocking down 22 of their 33 field-goal attempts inside the 3-point line, with an early second-half flurry — the first seven points out of the locker room to break a 33-all tie at intermission — and what soon became a brutal UF dry spell of 8 minutes and 24 seconds without a field goal.
Florida fell behind by 10 in the first half, but stuck around and slowly cut into the margin, and when grad-transfer wing Phlandrous Fleming Jr. (9 points, 8 rebounds, 3 assists, 3 steals) grabbed a rebound and went coast-to-coast for a layup at the horn the teams went to intermission tied at 33-all.
It took the first 90 seconds of the second half for Musketeers to retake control. Johnson hit a 3 just 14 seconds in. Seven-foot forward Jack Nunge (12 points, 8 rebounds) followed a Florida miss with a layup. And then Xavier guard Paul Scruggs turned a UF turnover into a bucket and quick seven-point lead.
After an old-fashion 3-point play by Florida freshman guard Kowacie Reeves (14 points), the Musketeers scored another seven straight points before a couple consecutive Florida baskets by fifth-year senior guard Tyree Appleby (10 points) and backup wing Niels Lane, the latter drawing the Gators within seven with 14:39 left in the game.
UF's next field goal came with 6:15 to play.
"We weren't hitting shots, that's what it came down to," Castleton said. "All year, we've prided ourselves on defense, but if you don't hit shots you're not going to win he game. They started making plays off our misses, and that's how it went down."
And out. Florida went 8-for-36 in the second half (.222), low-lighted by those 18 misses on 19 heaves from the arc. That's 5.3 percent. The team's 23 points after intermission were a second-half low this season.
The Gators had had plenty of poor-shooting games during '21-22. They hit at least 45 percent in only nine games this season and only 35 percent from distance in nine games, as well.
Against Xavier, The three elder transfers who arrived this season — Fleming, fellow grad Brandon McKissic and senior Myreon Jones — combined to make just of four of 25 field-goal tries and one of 15 from deep. They'd had similar nights individually this season (each Gator had this season), but this one just had a different kind of look and feel.
Senior forward Colin Castleton(12) made four of eight shots and finished with 10 points and six rebounds in what likely was his final game as a Gator.
Maybe the Gators were, understandably, preoccupied by the situation back home. Then again, Xavier was also came into the game with an interim coach, Jonas Hayes, and learned less than 24 hours earlier that Sean Miller, who built the Musketeers into a powerhouse before his scandal-ridden run in Arizona, was returning to the program.
Who knows?
"It's hard to tell with kids, man," Pinkins said. "Hard to tell if that had anything to do with it."
It probably did. And now, for a handful of them, it's over. There's no question about the impact that realization had in the guys in the locker room.
"This was a special group," Fleming said. "We'll always be family."
Always be Gators.
"I'm going to choose to approach it with a positive mindset," Castleton said. "We all loved putting on this Florida jersey. Me? I loved every second of it."
Pinkins only had two games as their "interim" head coach, but he's been with the program four seasons. As such he had a front-row seat for a couple NCAA Tournaments, the revolving-door nature of the transfer portal, watching a first-round draft pick blossom and watching another future NBA player's mid-game collapse, as well as the fallout and toll that tragedy took on the players who stuck with the team and played on.
"Our seniors who are leaving been through so much. I just think all those guys are all going to be successful in life," Pinkins said. "You're going to have adversity. We talked about that from the start of the year. You're going to have lows — and we had some lows now — and this is a low. They'll learn from it and they'll learn from the coaching situation. It's a good group. We didn't play the way we're capable of playing [Sunday], but I'm proud of these guys."
