After playing with what he called a 6-1/2-man rotation last year, coach Billy Donovan has to be salivating over the lineup combinations available to him this season.
For the first time since the departure of the heralded ‘04s, the Gators’ coach believes he will be able to use both larger and smaller variations of his starting five.
No. 11 Florida will put a few of those groupings on display tonight at 7 in the O’Connell Center when it squares off against Georgetown (Ky.) College in its second and final exhibition game.
After experimenting with numerous lineups in Florida’s opener and limiting seniors Alex Tyus and Vernon Macklin to just 10 and 12 minutes, respectively. Donovan said he will return to more traditional looks in tonight’s matchup.
“My No. 1 goal going into the (Florida Tech) game was to try to get enough minutes for all the freshman,” Donovan said. “So the lineups we had out there a lot of times were maybe lineups that we wouldn’t have necessarily in a lot of regular-season games.”
This could mean more action for Florida’s starting five, which only saw about six minutes of playing time against Florida Tech.
Also likely to see more minutes is a larger lineup that includes freshman Patric Young and senior Vernon Macklin.
Donovan first tinkered with playing the two former McDonald’s All-Americans together in team practices and scrimmages, and the unit yielded encouraging results.
“I think it’s a good look,” senior Chandler Parsons said. “It’s different and I think it’s just another lineup we can throw out there with the pieces that we have.”
The duo played together for 2:52 of the team’s exhibition opener, a stretch when the Gators were outscored 11-5.
Macklin and Young combined for 0 points and 0 rebounds in the initial test run. But their mere presence generated a trio of long-range shooting opportunities for the Gators, as the Panthers were forced to divert their defensive attention to the interior.
“That’s something that we gotta continue to work on in practice,” Donovan said.
At the Southeastern Conference’s media day, Donovan remarked that the two “kinda got in each other’s way,” as each is accustomed to playing center and controlling the paint.
The configuration requires Macklin to shift from his traditional role out to the power forward position, where he is learning new responsibilities like taking the ball out and playing at the top of the press.
Even if the unit is eventually scrapped, senior Alex Tyus and the remaining Gators will have benefitted from working against it in practice.
“It was just like a regular SEC game,” Tyus said. “Pat plays real physical, and Vern’s a great player.”
Another lineup the Gators have experimented with uses guards Kenny Boynton, Erving Walker and Scottie Wilbekin simultaneously, although practice as a trio has been put on hold due to Wilbekin’s neck strain.
The only time the alignment was actually featured was in an intrasquad scrimmage, where it received positive reviews.
“It was fun,” Boynton said. “Our team was very intense. We got a lot of steals and basically for the time that we were in we were a speed team.”
