Entering his senior season, Erving Walker was challenged by Florida coach Billy Donovan to do less.
As a 5-foot-8 point guard nearly four years removed from playing high school ball in Brooklyn, N.Y., Walker had spent the majority of his college years carrying the Gators’ shooting load.
He ended his freshman year with Florida’s best 3-point percentage. As a sophomore, Walker was second in points, followed by last season, when he led the team in scoring.
This year, Donovan requested that Walker simply focus on passing more.
“His goal needs to be to lead the league in assists,” Donovan said back in October. “With us having more shooting around Erving and with his speed and quickness, he needs to be a guy who has a great assist-to-turnover ratio.”
But for Florida’s most experienced starter, facilitating rather than scoring would take time.
Walker played in all 37 games of the Gators’ Elite Eight season in 2010-11, but he didn’t even lead his own team in assists. That feat was accomplished by Chandler Parsons, a 6-foot-9 forward, who went on to be the Southeastern Conference Player of the Year.
“It’s been an up-and-down process, but I think it’s getting better,” Walker said. “Just learning as a team, I think we (are) still learning — even though it’s mid-January — we (are) still learning.”
Saturday at South Carolina, Walker appeared to turn a corner, tying a season-high with seven assists to just two turnovers in a 79-65 Florida victory.
For the first time on the road this season, his missed shots, on a 3-of-5 shooting night, didn’t total more than his assists. As a result, the No. 17 Gators (14-4, 2-1 SEC) also grabbed their first true away win, ending a 0-4 streak.
Walker, a finalist for the Bob Cousy award, given to the nation’s top point guard, now ranks second in the league with 90 assists, trailing Tennessee’s Trae Golden by only one.
“Really for the entire game, we really made good decisions,” Donovan said. “We moved the basketball and made a high number of assists with a good number of turnovers.”
Despite a 10-assist showing in its last away game at Tennessee, and 6-foot-9 center Patric Young limited by injury, Florida tore apart South Carolina’s defense with a season-best 19 assists.
Florida was averaging just 12.5 assists in previous true road games, and Walker’s effort is even more impressive considering 20 percent of his assists have gone to Young this season.
Young didn’t start for the first time this season and played just 13 minutes due to suspected tendinitis in his right ankle. He will undergo X-rays and an MRI on his injured ankle this week, Donovan said Monday.
“My team’s working with me,” Walker said. “They’ve been great in understanding that it’s definitely a process, and it just doesn’t happen overnight.”
After Kenny Boynton knocked down a first-half three off a Walker assist, the junior guard returned the favor by passing up a breakaway layup with 3:34 left and dishing the ball back to Walker on the wing.
“As I looked back, I seen Erving running too. So I knew if I went up with it, it probably would’ve gotten blocked, so I just threw it out to Erv,” Boynton said.
Walker drained the three, his final shot of the game, to push him into double figures with 11 points.
But even as the Gators lead the nation with 195 threes — 25 more than the combined amount of their next two opponents, LSU and Mississippi — Walker can take pride in also guiding the SEC’s top assisting team.
Florida has 304 assists as a team and, with 13 games left, is on pace to dish out more than last year’s team, which ended the season on top of the league in assist statistics and in the overall standings.
“As a basketball player, you don’t want to be labeled as one type of player,” Walker said. “So to be able to do multiple things, I would say is a good thing.”
Contact John Boothe at jboothe@alligator.org.
A year after he didn’t even lead the team in assists, Florida point guard Erving Walker is second in the Southeastern Conference this season with 90, trailing only Tennessee’s Trae Golden (91).
