Youth Serving Well
Somehow it all works.
Florida’s collection of a young coach and even younger players, a group that includes a South Dakota phenom, a shooting guard with a 5-foot-9 body and a mountain of attitude, a quiet kid from the farmlands of Georgia, a “hillbilly” from West Virginia is in the Final Four.
It isn’t just a collection of personalities, it’s a collection of talent.
As adept as Florida Coach Billy Donovan has been at recruiting McDonald’s All-Americans, his greatest accomplishment is getting them to play like McDonald’s workers. They cook the fries, take the drive-through orders and let the glory fall where it may.
“I think that’s what makes this team so special,” sophomore center Udonis Haslem said. “Everybody was willing to come in and put their differences aside. Teddy Dupay averaged 41 points in high school. Mike Miller averaged 33. Matt Bonner averaged like 35, 36. You’ve got guys that were the star of the team. Everybody was willing to come here and sacrifice for the good of the team.”
At Florida, no player averages more than 30 minutes and 15 points a game.
Donnell Harvey, the 6-8 freshman from Georgia who was USA Today’s high school basketball player of the year, started only nine times this season. Elsewhere, that might start transfer rumors flying. At Florida it means he finds himself on the bench at the beginning of games sitting next to fellow McDonald’s All-American Brett Nelson.
They don’t stay long, however. Donovan relies on 10 players. He often substitutes two at a time. If things aren’t going the way he wants, he’ll take out all five players on the floor, exchanging lineups as if they were shirts at Nordstrom.
If there’s a standout, it’s Miller. But barely. His averages of 14 points and six rebounds a game don’t jump off the stat sheet. And he likes it that way.
His arrival at Florida let Gator fans know it was time to believe Donovan had something going. Yet another All-American, from the hoops hotbed of South Dakota, his bypassing of such traditional powers as Kentucky and Kansas had other coaches crying foul. (An NCAA investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing.)
But instead of having to be solely responsible for the fortunes of Florida basketball, he is just another part.
“The thing that made it easier was my class was really good and the class behind me was really good,” Miller said. “If I would have came in by myself and nobody else behind me, then there would be pressure. Now I don’t have to go out and put up 25 a night and do that stuff. When you’ve got as many good players as we do, it kind of makes it easier.”
He still gets the ball when the game is on the line. The whole season rested in his hands in the first-round game against Butler, when the Gators trailed the No. 12-seeded team by one point in overtime. Miller took a shot that bounced off the rim and through the net as the buzzer sounded.
Then something changed. The Gators bounced No. 4-seeded Illinois, No. 1-seeded Duke, and No. 3-seeded Oklahoma State to win the East Regional. Their youth (with four freshmen and three sophomores in the regular rotation) became less of a liability and more of an asset.
“When you’re young like we are, you don’t go through enough emotional highs and lows, so to speak, emotional things,” Donovan said. “I thought the Butler game drew us together emotionally.”
Said Miller: “We’re all basically the same personality. We all love hoops and we all like doing the same thing. We’re all gym rats.”
Even if there are some regional differences. Dupay, from Fort Meyers, Fla., says sometimes he has to explain the way things work in pickup games to the likes of Nelson, the freshman from St. Albans, W.Va.
“He’s a hillbilly, man,” Dupay said.
It is a sign of the times that great players from West Virginia aren’t compared to Jerry West anymore; they’re compared to Jason Williams.
But there’s a lot more White Chocolate than Mr. Clutch in Nelson’s game. How else to describe a guy who comes in firing three-point shots before he has even had a chance to tuck in his jersey and goes behind his back for a layup during the East Regional final?
The 5-9 Dupay, meanwhile, comes off as a smaller version of Donovan. Same feisty attitude, which means they have plenty of clashes.
“We definitely get after it,” said Dupay, a high-school All-American who committed to Florida after his sophomore year. “He is up in me every single day. He knows how to handle certain players. Other guys can’t really take that. I know that, that’s the way I get motivated.”
All of Donovan’s tactics appear to be working.
Close your eyes when Donovan talks and you’ll swear it’s Rick Pitino, as if the years he spent playing for Pitino at Providence and as an assistant on his staff at Kentucky caused him to absorb all of Pitino’s accent and speech mannerisms.
Now open your eyes and see all that Donovan has accomplished in his four years at Florida. He has made the Gator basketball team a presence not only on the Florida campus--where football has always ruled--but nationally. The team is stocked with young talent. At 34, he became the sixth person to play and coach in the Final Four.
And not a single lock of his hair was messed up in the process.
He dodged efforts to put a Final Four cap on his head while the team celebrated its victory over Oklahoma State on the Carrier Dome court Sunday in Syracuse. But the team took aim at his hair in the locker room.
“We got him with a bucket full of water,” Dupay said. “It threw it out of whack a little bit. Not a lot.”
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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Saturday
at RCA Dome, Indianapolis
Michigan State (30-7) vs. Wisconsin (22-13)
2:30 p.m., Channel 2
*
North Carolina (22-13) vs. Florida (28-7)
*5 p.m., Channel 2
*30 minutes after first game
*
Championship
Monday
at RCA Dome, Indianapolis 6 p.m., Channel 2
