Looking at the scoreboard and the box score, one would assume it was just a regular blowout where the #24 Florida Gators (7-1) quietly swept the North Florida Ospreys (3-6) under the rug. But, a closer look at the stats reveals an unbelievable performance by senior guard Dallas Moore that may have punched his NBA draft ticket.
To the surprise of everyone in the building, North Florida started the game without one of their key players. Senior forward Chris Davenport was suspended indefinitely by head coach Matthew Driscoll following the breaking of team rules.
Coach Driscoll declined to further comment on the cause of his suspension and banned his players from doing so. Spinnaker will reveal any new details we discover.
To start the game, the Ospreys couldn’t get anything off, but the Gators had no answer for Moore. In fact, Moore was the only player to score a point for North Florida until there was 8:23 left in the half.
Moore would go on to shoulder his entire team in scoring throughout the course of the game with 31 points. However the biggest problem of the night was that the rest of the team struggled greatly to get buckets and without Moore, the Gators would have out gunned the Ospreys 91-29.
Even Florida Gators head coach Mike White was at a loss when asked what the game plan was to stop Moore.
“We had it wrong whatever it was,” White said. “We did a poor job there. Credit Dallas – he’s a terrific player and his teammates did a great job of putting him in positions to be successful. [We] did a better job on him last spring… Could Dallas start for many high-major teams? Generally speaking, absolutely.”
Some of the Ospreys other struggles on the game included being out scored 51 to 16 in bench points, losing points in the paint by 20 points and only shooting 37 percent as a team.
The most alarming stat for North Florida is that without Moore going 6-12 from the beyond the arc, the team would’ve gone 0-10. However the thing that bothered Coach Driscoll the most was the 20 turnovers the team had.
“Well the worst in eight years we ever had was six games [in a season] with 20 turnovers,” Coach Driscoll said. “In the last three years combined we had four games with 20 turnovers. Probably a third to a half are self-inflicted. When you’re trying to make a pass, when you’re trying to get a teammate a shot you can sometimes accept those, but when they’re self-inflicted that’s not good.”
With Moore putting on a draft-showcase game and the rest of the team left with many question marks, the squad will have varying types of motivation pushing them into Saturday’s matchup on the road against the #21 Syracuse Orange Dec. 3.
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