GAINESVILLE, Fla. – After a tight loss to Michigan State and a ten-day break the Gators were thought to show some solid improvement against the Mercer Bears. Well, that wasn’t quite the case in the 71-63 victory.

“Really poor finish,” head coach Mike White said. “We didn’t defend at the same level we’ve been defending at all year.”

“Had some offensive bright spots, but still not anywhere where we need to be to be really competitive in our league and how to get back to defending at the level at which we’ve been defending at.”

Freshman guard Noah Locke led the way for the Gators in scoring with 18 points on 6-13 shooting (46%) and 5-11 (45%) from deep in the dense three-point shooting game for Florida.

“He was really good,” White said of the freshman. “He plays as hard as anybody on our team and I thought he and Kevarrius Hayes played the hardest tonight.

“I think they brought the most life to the team and you combine that with making shots, hard to take him out of the game," added the Gators head coach. "He plays within himself, makes simple plays, got some toughness, guards at a high level, plays with energy, tries to communicate. We need to start challenging him and Andrew (Nembhard) to lead more because we don’t have enough of it on our roster.”

Florida made a concerted effort to knock down the triple as 33 of a possibly 57 shots (57 %) were from deep, but overall it wasn’t a very good night on the offensive end.

White and the coaching staff have worked these guys very hard over the last ten days and some fatigue may have contributed to Florida’s performance on the court tonight.

“I thought they really worked,” White said of his team during the ten days off. “They really did. We were very demanding on them physically and mentally. We wore them out for ten days, and I think you could probably see a couple side affects of that. Some of the twelve of 33 is on me. I thought we looked a little heavy-legged. I don’t want to give my guys excuses ever, but that’s just the reality of it.”

KeVaughn Allen and Keith Stone also contributed on offense. The duo combined to go 5-10 from deep while Allen finished with 15 points and Stone finished with nine.

Defensively, the Gators were still solid overall as they held the Bears to just 40 percent shooting and 63 points, but Mercer was able to hang around in the first half by hitting their fair share of threes as well - going 5-13 from deep, but there were too many lapses in the final five minutes of the game defensively.

However, the lone bright spot on defense in the second half was how well they defended the three ball. The Bears only hit two triples on ten attempts in the second half, and although the Bears went on a run toward the end of the game, the defense held strong throughout and was enough to pull out the victory.

“They started trapping ball screens more and their tags were different,” Mercer head coach Bob Hoffman said. That was a real adjustment they made.

“We got a couple guys open because of that, but it hurt us from getting open threes because they were able to stay home longer. We tried to run a fee thigns off that, but they recovered quickly.

“When you have the athleticism and length that they do, it’s tough.”

It was an ugly game for the Gators, but that has been the story of the season up to this point. The last five minutes in particular were very disappointing.

We thought there might be a turnaround after a ten-day break and some hard practices, but the Gators still have a long ways to go before conference play picks up and with not many games to do so.

“I don’t mean to sound really down on our guys,” White said. “I think our team plays really hard comparatively speaking. Coming into the game we’re sixth in the country in defensive efficiency.

“This team has really sold out to guarding 90-95 percent of the time. Are we as disciplined as we need to be, no. Why do I harp on it with this team more than any other I’ve had, probably because I haven’t had a team that struggles to score as much.

“For this team to beat top-25 teams, high-level SEC teams, any SEC team, we’ve gotta be extremely accountable defensively while we continue to work on our offensive issues. We haven’t had a game yet where we just outscore somebody where we put 85 on a good defense. So, in the meantime we’ve gotta really, really guard.”