After a pair of games in which their offense looked disorganized and out of sync, the Gators returned to form against American and rediscovered what it takes to get clean looks at the basket.
Now all they have to do is start converting those opportunities into points.
If Florida is to live up to its lofty preseason expectations — and more immediately score a victory over Kent State on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the O’Connell Center — it will have to find a way to improve its 3-point shooting percentage, which has been only mediocre so far this season.
With Vernon Macklin emerging as a dominant scorer in the paint, the Gators are likely to face a number of zone defenses like they did Sunday against American.
Those schemes provide help for the opposition’s interior defenders, thus forcing UF to take shots from the outside, something it hasn’t excelled at to this point.
“I wouldn’t say I’m concerned, but I do think teams maybe start doing that,” senior Chandler Parsons said. “We just have to continue to move the ball. We’re not shooting a high percentage, but if we have a good look at the 3 we’re obviously going to still take it.”
Despite trying to hold for the best available look, the Gators have shot just 33 percent from beyond the arc this season.
That total puts them below the 34-percent mark that is not only the national average, but also what opponents have shot against them this year.
“Overall shooting we’ve been up and down as a team,” junior Erving Walker said. “Shots are going to come and go.”
The Gators have definitely had their highs and lows from long distance, shooting better than 40 percent against Ohio State and North Carolina A&T before hitting just 15 percent against UCF.
This game-to-game variance is something coach Billy Donovan has come to accept from players like Parsons, Walker and sophomore Kenny Boynton, who have all shown the ability to be scorching hot or ice cold at any given moment.
“We’re going to be a team that’s probably going to be streaky from the 3-point line,” Donovan said. “When you look at the course of a season there’s a lot of ebbs and flow of shooting, and what you’re probably going to have to do is look at the shooting percentage at the end of the year.”
Florida’s streaky shooting is personified best by Boynton, who has had three games without a 3-pointer, five games with multiple 3-pointers and none in between.
So far this season, Boynton shoots 30 percent from 3-point range following a make and just 21 percent from distance following a miss.
He also converts 36 percent of his long-range chances in halves when he made his first attempt while scoring only 12 percent of those tries in halves where he missed his first shot.
Boynton says his confidence is not an issue, but he does admit that his first attempt can be a predictor of things to come.
“It can go either way, and sometimes it just depends on the game and the shots that I take,” Boynton said. “Depending on whether I hit my first one, that’s how the half will be.”
