After a buzzer beater from Kenny Boynton pushed Florida’s lead to 21 at halftime, the Gators had reason to head to the locker room fired up. Although the team came out with a win, Florida had a little less to smile about after the final horn sounded.
UF (9-3) snapped its three-game losing streak with a 76-60 win against American (2-11) but nearly squandered a dominant first-half performance in which the Eagles finished with three times as many turnovers (12) as they did field goals made (four).
The Gators took a commanding lead into halftime by scoring seven points in the final 1:18 before intermission, including the 35-footer by Boynton as the buzzer sounded, and held the Eagles to 20 percent shooting from the field.
But American clawed its way back into the game in the second half, hitting 8 of 16 3-pointers and cutting the lead to nine points with 39 seconds remaining.
It was enough for UF coach Billy Donovan to keep his players in the locker room for nearly 20 minutes after the game ended.
“We got shown the film of when they were cutting the lead down,” said Boynton, who finished with 19 points on 7-of-15 shooting. “That’s what (Donovan) was getting on us about – teams coming back in the second half. We’ve just got to put a complete game together.”
The first half was as dominant as the Gators have looked all season, especially down low, as junior power forward Alex Tyus and junior center Vernon Macklin scored 12 each – six more points than American’s entire team had in the opening period.
Tyus finished with a team-high 20 points and nine rebounds, and Macklin added 18 points and five boards.
“We shot the ball better from the 3-point line, percentage-wise, but I also thought we did a pretty good job of locating Vern and Alex around the basket,” Donovan said. “We had some pretty good balance in our post.”
The one-two punch inside helped free up Boynton outside, and Boynton’s 4-of-7 shooting from beyond the arc helped improve Florida’s 3-point percentage to 40 percent on the night, a huge improvement on the combined 6-of-37 shooting over the team’s last two games.
“I thought our 3s were good 3s – all of them – and we didn’t take a lot of them,” Donovan said. “I thought we had a little better rhythm. Inside-out, we were a little more cohesive. But I thought early in the game, we definitely had a post presence.”
Boynton pointed to the team’s lack of energy as part of the second-half struggles on defense for the shorthanded Gators, who were without sophomore guard Ray Shipman and sophomore center Kenny Kadji, who did not dress out for Monday’s game due to injuries.
“I think it was by far our fatigue,” Boynton said. “This is the first time I ever got tired. It had to be the break because I never usually get tired, but I got tired tonight.”
Shipman is dealing with a patellar subluxation, which he suffered during the first half of Florida’s 67-66 loss to South Alabama on Dec. 22, and Kadji has struggled with an injured lower back since early December. Both players were on the Gators’ bench in street clothes. With the team cut down to a steady rotation of seven scholarship players, walk-on sophomore guard Kyle McClanahan stepped up to play 13 minutes, including eight in the first half.
“Kyle, I thought, when he got into the game, actually made our team better. It’s like the old Lou Gehrig story where Wally Pipp got sick one day. Maybe this is a situation where Kyle, because of some injuries and some situations, works his way into the lineup and we can give him some more minutes.”
Florida will get only one day off before returning to the O’Connell Center floor on Wednesday in a 7 p.m. matchup with Presbyterian.
