Friday, February 21, 2025 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry
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By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer
BATON ROUGE, La. – The fleeting sequence Tuesday night was on brand for a game that was lopsided at the time and ended up that way; an 85-63 victory for the home team. It was two measly possessions in a game of 130 possessions.
Consider this a crash course in real-time basketball analytics, Todd Golden style.
After the second of two free throws by Florida senior guard Will Richard gave the Gators a 20-point lead over Oklahoma with 29.3 seconds to play in the first half, UF called a timeout. In the Gators' huddle, Golden's beautiful basketball mind calculated the situation: Sooners' ball; shot clock off; OU in the bonus; final play of half.
Golden wanted to steal one more possession.
When play resumed, OU brought the ball into the halfcourt, with UF guard Walter Clayton in the chest of counterpart Jeremiah Fears and fouling him 45 feet from the basket with 10.6 seconds left. To the casual fan, it looked like a bad foul. Fears, one of the best freshman in the Southeastern Conference and an 84.6-percent free-throw shooter, was headed to the line for a likely two points.
Fears, though, missed the front end of the one-and-one. The ball was rebounded by UF sophomore guard Urban Klavzar, who sped up the court, knifed through the scrambled Oklahoma defense and banked in a contested layup with just over one second to go. The Florida lead went from 20 to 22.
After the game, Golden was asked about the foul. Specifically, whether it was intentional. His answer required a calculator, but it encapsulated the new-age, forward basketball thinking that Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin and his search committee saw three years ago in Golden, then a 36-year-old upstart at the University of San Francisco and whose second-ranked Gators (23-3, 10-3) go for a sixth straight victory Saturday night against LSU (14-12, 3-10) at Maravich Assembly Center.
[Read senior writer Chris Harry's "Pregame Stuff" setup here]
Try following along. And remember, this is a coach who as a kid growing up in Phoenix used to entertain himself by memorizing the license plates of all the cars in his neighborhood.
"Generally, at the end of the half, that last possession, is probably worth like .85 [or] .90, something like that," Golden began, using the universal points-per-100-possessions metric applied to basketball analytics. "So it's .9 for them and zero for us, because we weren't getting a shot, right? So, we want to be aggressive."
Gators guard Urban Klavzar (7) made the coast-to-coast play at the end of the half against Oklahoma, sinking a driving, banking layup with just over one second to go.
Fouling Fears, an outstanding free-throw shooter, probably wasn't ideal, Golden allowed. It increased OU's chances to score to 1.5 points that possession, but the Gators were assured of getting the ball back (assuming they secured the rebound off a miss) with 10 seconds still to go.
"So that's .85 or .90 our way, so we saved a couple tenths of a point and it broke our way," Golden said. "He missed the one-and-one, we come down, score and end up winning [the exchange] 2-0."
Got that?
Didn't think so.
Jonathan Safir, UF's director of basketball strategy and analytics who accompanied Golden from USF, flushed it out further. Jonathan Safir
"The math of it is this: If we let them hold for the last shot, that's a possession they're guaranteed to get, and we're guaranteed not to get one," Safir said. "The end-of-half possession, when the shot clock is off, is worth a little less than a normal possession because the defense knows about when the shot is coming. So, instead of being worth a normal 1.0 or 1.05 points per possession, it's worth .85."
That number, Safir added, is not arbitrary. It's been studied and computed.
He continued: "So Oklahoma is getting .85 on that possession and we're getting zero. But if we foul an 80-percent free-throw shooter, 80 percent in the one-and-one means there's an 80-percent chance he makes the first and 80-percent chance he gets a second [attempt]. So the value of the first shot is .8. So, .8 multiplied by .8 is .64. That's the value of the second shot. Add them together makes it 1.44, but we're getting .85 because we're getting a possession with 10 seconds on the clock. So, we're basically increasing the variance and reducing how much we're supposed to lose that sequence by. Instead of losing it by .85, we lose by .65. We're losing by less, but increasing the variance."
Repeat: Trying to lose by less.
Except Fears missed the first free throw, meaning Oklahoma got zero on its possession. The Gators got the rebound (and possession), scored at the other end and won the sequence 2.0 to zero.
"Even if they made both free throws, if we scored, we'd be happy," Safir said.
This is the kind of analytical approach that wowed the UF search committee and helped elevate Golden above the handful of others in the mix for the Florida job.
"Have you seen anybody else do that?" asked UF assistant coach Kevin Hovde, the team's offensive coordinator, in recounting the end-of-half play. "Nobody thinks that way. No one does that. Everybody would sit back and guard and tell their team not to foul."
OK maybe not everybody. Golden was asked Friday how many coaches in America are doing real-time, in-game analytics at that level. Not a lot, he said.
An estimate: Maybe 5 percent.
Actually, probably more like 5.28 percent (with an increased variance) … or something like that.
Email senior writer Chris Harry at charry@gators.ufl.edu
