The Gators only have two games left to play in the O’Connell Center. March, the month synonymous with the NCAA Tournament, is two weeks away.
Time is running out on this season, but that hasn’t stopped coach Billy Donovan’s search for tougher, more resilient basketball players.
“I’m not pleased,” Donovan said Saturday after Tennessee finished a season sweep of UF. “These guys are great guys, but we haven’t been hardened enough. …We need to practice better. We need to be more on edge. We need to take everything to a different level.”
After being pushed around and outplayed in a pair of losses last week, Donovan reflected during his postgame press conference on a time he barely had to look for a mentally strong and focused team.
He invoked the names of past Gators, winners of multiple national championships.
“Joakim Noah, Al Horford and those guys weren’t hardened, either,” Donovan said. “But there is a mentality and an understanding of what really goes into a preparation to really go out there and win.”
Donovan said his current crop of players need to experience the adversity of mounting injuries or the indignity of blowout losses.
“There are certain teams that you sit there and you look back and say, ‘You know what? They had to kind of go through it,’” he said.
If so, Donovan should have seen a change months ago. The Gators have been through their fair share of adversity already.
Before conference play began, tight road losses at Ohio State and Syracuse should have shown them how national championship-caliber teams crash the boards and create turnovers. At Rutgers, the Gators learned the pain of an overtime loss.
Injuries to forward Erik Murphy and Patric Young forced Florida to play eight games without its regular starting five.
The only hardship seemingly left for the Gators to experience occurred when forward Will Yeguete — UF’s leader in steals and rebounding percentage, according to Kenpom.com — suffered his second concussion of the season against the Volunteers.
“You can play really, really hard and really, really well and be undermanned and still fall short, and you walk off the court disappointed and upset, figuring out where you can get better,” Donovan said.
As UF’s primary energy player off the bench, Yeguete was sorely missed in the five-point loss and again in a win Tuesday at Alabama.
At 6-foot-7, he’s undersized and not much of a shot blocker, but he’s also the key to the Gators’ press and a magician at engineering steals.
Without him in the lineup, UF is missing its one player who fits Donovan’s “hardened” billing. A void has been created for someone like Murphy, Young, Casey Prather or Scottie Wilbekin to match Yeguete’s impact down the stretch.
But with just five games left in the regular season, the window is closing fast.
Contact John Boothe at jboothe@alligator.org.
