With a few new pieces on his roster and a limited offseason to work with, Florida coach Mike White still has a lot to learn about his team ahead of the 2020-21 season.
He’s not sure who his starting point guard will be, the amount of players he’ll have in his rotation or even how many will be available for each game due to COVID-19.
“We’ve had issues,” White said. “Heck, about 10 days there we had five guys at practice. I want to say 8-10 consecutive days. I try to block it from my memory. It was nuts.”
White does know one thing: the Gators will play faster and with more tempo. They ran their offense last season through Kerry Blackshear Jr. and Andrew Nembhard, who played at a slow pace.
Their departures — and replacements — will allow White to speed up Florida’s style of play.
“We’re quicker, we’re faster, we’re more athletic and I’m hopeful that we’re deeper. We definitely have more potential depth. We have more parity. We have more versatility,” White said of this year’s group. “With that level of athleticism and speed and quickness, I think there’s a chance we get better at attacking the rim, putting more pressure on the rim, drawing more fouls and being better in the open floor.
“We haven’t had many easy baskets the last two years. I think that goes hand in hand with our ability to extend our defense, to get us out in the open floor and we’ve got to convert in the open floor. We should be a better offensive rebounding team, which is exciting to be able to get some easy ones. But a lot of that is based again on effort and toughness and buy-in.”
Transfers Tyree Appleby and Anthony Duruji are now eligible after sitting out last season, as Appleby competes with Tre Mann and Ques Glover for the start at point guard. The Gators also added Michigan graduate transfer Colin Castleton and junior college transfer Osayi Osifo to a roster that returns three starters in Keytonae Johnson, Scottie Lewis and Noah Locke, who underwent hip surgery May 13.
“Out of necessity and out of desire, we’re gonna extend pressure and we're gonna play faster. I think our increase in tempo will be amongst the national leaders. That's our aim. Heading into game one, I anticipate a significant increase in level of tempo,” White said. “I think that's what gives this team the best chance. And that’s what we want to do, that’s how we want to play.
“Defensively, we’re going to press. We’re going to pressure. How much will depend on how good we get at it and how committed we are. Pressing is hard. It’s hard mentally and it’s hard physically. We’re pressing a lot right now; we’ve pressed a lot in the last five days. How effective it will be early season, mid-season, we’ll see.”
Despite their desire to play faster offensively, the Gators’ tempo is still a work in progress. They’ve committed far too many turnovers during the first week of practice and White said his players must “value the ball at a higher level.” Nembhard led the SEC last season in assist/turnover ratio (2.2).
“We’ve had more turnovers in the past five days than I think we had last season,” White said. “If we're going to be a pressure team and play with a ton of energy when we get the basketball, we've got to calm down. We're not in a very good place with that right now. But we still got five more weeks.
“We’re in good shape, our guys are excited about the tempo. We're probably a little bit more comfortable with our extension of the defense right now than our extension of offense. Our defensive energy and intensity and competitiveness has been very, very good. We gotta execute some stuff a lot better and clean up a lot of mistakes.”
