If three-point shooting gets any worse for the Florida Gators, Todd Golden might need to consider having a halftime contest to see if there is a student on campus who can make threes he can add as a walk-on. Even in their win over George Washington, nobody outside of Xaivian Lee and Thomas Haugh made a three for Florida, and the Gators shot 22% from deep.
Florida is now 352nd in the country in three-point shooting. There are only 365 teams in the country for those keeping score at home.
After the win against George Washington, Lee said out loud what every Florida fan has been thinking.
Xaivian Lee acknowledges Florida can’t shoot threes
Lee himself had his best game as a Gator, scoring 24 points and going 4-8 from deep. But everyone else on the roster struggled on Saturday from deep, and Lee didn’t try to shy away from it after the game:
“Yeah, I mean, I don't think we're ever going to turn down the open ones. I think as a team, we have so many strengths. And obviously, shooting hasn't been one so far. But I think we know we're all capable of making shots, especially us as guards. We've been shooting really poorly, but I think it's only up from here.
I think we're all gonna make a lot more shots in the future. And I think we're at our floor as a team, honestly, because we've only been controlling what we can control, and I think when that other stuff starts to come together, we'll be very dangerous.”
The thing is, there were moments where you could tell the inability to shoot the three was in the head of Florida, and there were moments when the Gators should probably have let it rip, but didn’t.
The struggle for Todd Golden is that while Florida is hanging around against the elites and is better than their record indicates, at some point, Florida is going to need someone to step up and hit some big shots that haven’t fallen to this point.
The other struggle is that Florida’s guards have never been able to sync up at once. While Lee was 4-8, Boogie Fland was 0-4, and Urban Klavzar was 0-3. Throw in freshman CJ Ingram missing his lone three to move to 2-7 on the season from deep, and there don’t seem to be great options on the roster to fix these woes.
But to Lee’s point, if the shots from deep do start to fall, this team could still be very dangerous come March.