Florida men’s basketball head coach Mike White discusses the Gators 68-54 win over the Bulldogs on the road in Athens at Stegeman Coliseum on Wednesday evening.
On coming back from a deficit in both games against Georgia:
“No, it’s not specific to Georgia as much as it is specific to us. We’re a young team, we’re probably a little too emotional. We’re streaky. We’ve lost a couple leads, I hate to advertise it again, but Mississippi State at home I think we had it at 16 and couldn’t hold on. Five or six of these where you’re down, I don’t know we were down that much tonight, but Georgia at home, Alabama at home and there were a couple others where we were down double digits if I’m not mistaken. Just staying the course. We’ve got our deficiencies as a team, but our guys are pretty resilient and we just keep plugging. I thought the biggest factor tonight by far and away was the way we defended. Georgia over the last three games was averaging over 90 [points], if not 90. They’re so hard to defend. We’ve had our defensive struggles at times this year and that’s as well as we’ve defended all year.”
On improving three-point shooting throughout the game:
“The lid came off when Scottie Lewis hit that first one of the second half and we settled in a little bit. For whatever reason, too, I think it’s probably not really us, but we finally took that lead. Andrew Nembhard at the foul line gave us that first lead. We played will confidence down the stretch. Noah Locke’s a great shooter. I thought Keyontae Johnson set a couple of good screens for him, Andrew Nembhard made some good passes to him. You need those to go down. You’ve got eight jump shots to be able to steal them on the road.”
On defending Anthony Edwards:
“Just a much better job and attention to detail to him collectively. That’s what he demands. We started talking about him a couple days ago. Not only him, but also [Sahvir] Wheeler in Gainesville. [Rayshaun] Hammonds is playing so well. [Tyree] Crump had four three’s last game if I’m not mistaken. [Jordan] Harris has always done damage against us. We spend a ton of time talking about these guys and how the numbers that they’re producing lately, it was easy to get our guys’ attention defensively. If not they would’ve put 90 [points] on us. They got off to such a good start in Gainesville that our guys were pretty locked in. I thought we did a pretty good job on transition defense and that’s a collective effort. Scottie did a really good job on [Edwards] for the most part. I thought our ball-screen defense was better led by Kerry Blackshear [Jr.]”
On what would have happened without Keyontae Johnson in the first half:
“Oh my goodness. Keyontae Johnson, I don’t know if it’s made public or not, but he’s had a personal tragedy that he’s dealing with the past couple of days. It’s a really emotional time for him, so I’m just really, really happy for him. He’s playing at a high level. 18 [points] and 11 [rebounds], +16. He kept us in the game in the first half and played a really good 20 minutes in the second half as well.”
On mixing things up defensively:
“I’m not a big zone guy, I never have been. I don’t really like to play zone, honestly. When you’re playing a team that scores as efficiently and easy as these guys, we were forced to work on some zone over the last couple games. We had some decent zone possessions in Gainesville. Just did a decent job with it really. I thought we were good in our man [defense] as well. I think our attention to detail relative to personnel was as good as it’s been all year in addition.”