PHOENIX – This time of year, college basketball teams are terrified of the bubble.
Count Florida as one of those teams, but not the we-might-not-make-the-tournament bubble – the Gators never really had to worry themselves with that.
This is a different kind of bubble, one that coach Billy Donovan pulls out when his team needs a spark, a boost of toughness. It covers the rim during practices, refusing to allow the ball to go through the net and providing a tremendous training aid when it comes to rebounding and defending the basket.
And Donovan brought it along with the team for use at Arizona State’s campus in preparation for the West regional semifinals, and now the final.
“I couldn’t believe we had it here, up here in Phoenix, that was unbelievable,” said center Patric Young, who pulled down nine boards in Florida’s win against Marquette on Thursday. “They had it on the scorer’s table and I told some of the guys, the ASU staff, I was like, ‘Make sure you take that with you.’ And then it turns out it was for us. … The ball won’t go in and trying to rebound during that is so hard. Guys just foul and it’s so physical.”
The work has paid off for the No. 7 seed Gators (26-10), who have outrebounded their three tournament opponents by a margin of 34 en route to a berth in Saturday’s Elite Eight showdown with No. 4 seed Louisville (29-9) at 4:30 p.m. Florida is also defending like never before this season, holding Virginia, Norfolk State and Marquette to an average of 51 points and a combined field-goal percentage of 32 percent.
Florida’s players say that their team’s run in the tournament should help buck the trendy notion that the Gators live and die by the three-point shot, despite leading the nation in made threes per game with 9.7. But that isn’t stopping Louisville from believing that the key to beating Florida lies in effectively guarding the Gators from beyond the arc.
“They do. They do. They live and die by the three,” Louisville guard Chris Smith said. “That’s our gameplan. We stop them from shooting threes, keep them off the glass, we’ll have the game. That’s our gameplan right there. If we can stop them from the three like we did Cincinnati and the other teams, we’ll win the game.”
To his credit, Smith has reason to be confident. The Cardinals have not allowed a team to shoot better than 23 percent from long range since a loss to Big East rival Syracuse on Feb. 13. They held Marquette to just 2 of 13 in the Big East Tournament and have allowed just 14 of 63 in three NCAA Tournament wins.
But Florida has proven it can win even when the threes aren’t falling, winning by an average margin of 23.3 points in the tournament and failing to make more than six 3-pointers in any game. Forward Erik Murphy heartily disagreed with the idea that the Gators must make threes to win.
“I don’t think that’s true about us at all,” he said. “A lot of people probably didn’t see that much of it during the season because we had our struggles defensively, but I think with our team we’ve had that belief internally all year that we don’t live and die by the three.”
Florida’s freshman phenom Brad Beal agreed, saying that Donovan has been preaching defending and rebounding all season knowing full well that shots aren’t always going to fall like the Gators might hope.
Said Beal: “Once that percentage starts increasing, once we start making shots, we can just be that much more better and that much more harder to guard.”
Thus begging the question: If Florida defends and rebounds like it has to start the tournament, and the deep shots start to fall, can this team be beaten?
“In our opinion, no,” Beal said. “That’s just the way we think, and we have confidence in ourselves. Whenever we’re playing the way coach wants us to play, and just playing with a tremendous amount of confidence and faith in one another, I think we can do it.”
Contact Matt Watts at mwatts@alligator.org.
Florida center Patric Young embraces guard Brad Beal during the team’s Sweet 16 meeting with Marquette in 2012.
