Florida outmuscles Kentucky in a key SEC battle
During the past month, a trend has captivated Instagram in which users post nostalgic, candid photos from 2016. Each comes with some variation of “2026 is the new 2016,” whatever that means.
In a move to make the lives of their schools’ social teams easier, No. 14 Florida and No. 25 Kentucky basketball, the top two teams in the Southeastern Conference, followed suit. Saturday in the O’Connell Center, the Wildcats and Gators, battling for the conference lead in the final month of the season — very 2016, if you will.
There was once a time — 2003 to 2018 — when this type of afternoon was typical. The two schools won 12 of 16 SEC Championships early in this century, regularly finding themselves in a foul-heavy scrap like the one Florida (19-6, 10-2 in the SEC) slugged out, 92-83, on Saturday.
“Our tenaciousness, our physicality, showed up the last 10 minutes of the game. We dominated that way,” Florida coach Todd Golden said to accompany light jabs about Kentucky’s $22 million roster. “This team has been at its best when we’re living in the now.
“Today was Kentucky.”
But even in the present, as it always seems to, times have changed. Because since 2018, Florida and Kentucky (17-8, 8-4 in the SEC) had only won a single SEC title — Florida’s last season. Because the pair hadn’t even played in Gainesville in more than two years, as the SEC has grown and their schedules haven’t.
In their best days, Florida and Kentucky were opposing models. Under coach John Calipari, the Wildcats were led in scoring by a freshman in nine of 10 seasons. They grabbed the top recruits, won with that talent for a year and then did it again. Florida leaned in the clashing direction. When the Gators won their last SEC title of that period in 2014, none of their top six scorers were in their first college seasons. Similarly, Florida’s previous championship-winning teams of the 2000s were abnormally old.
Nowadays, you can’t find two teams with such similar trajectories or of such similar form. To win in this college basketball landscape, you need a mix of experienced stalwarts and new faces. Florida and Kentucky both have that. When Xaivian Lee transferred to Florida, Denzel Aberdeen transferred out to Kentucky. To this point, Kentucky had gotten the better end of that deal, as Aberdeen has turned into one of its two primary offensive options, averaging 12 points per game. Lee has not done the same at Florida.
You couldn’t have possibly known it on Saturday.
“Credit to him, he played a solid game,” Condon said about his former teammate, Aberdeen. He had 19. But Lee had 22.
“He got off to a great start, knocking shots down,” Golden said. “He gave us a big lift.”
It wasn’t just Lee. Guard Urban Klavzar came off the bench for 19, Florida’s Thomas Haugh added 17 and three others had at least eight. Florida also shot 35.7% from three, which might be of greater note. The Gators did that three times before mid-January, and now they have done so in three of their last five games.
“The message before was: How good could our ceiling be if the shots start falling?” Lee said. “We’re seeing a little bit of that now.”
Another similarity: You wouldn’t have known these teams would be playing for the nation’s best conference (per Torvik, at least) when they were both 5-4 in early December after starting the season in the top 10. But here we were, and because of this concoction of history and a modern spark, this is the type of win that bolsters a team’s pitch to rejoin the nation’s best.
The scariest part? Florida’s frontcourt — that one that’s about to become the first team in more than 15 years to be top three in the country in offensive and defensive rebounding — only grabbed eight more boards than Kentucky and broke even at 36 paint points.
“I don’t think we played our best,” Golden said.
That should make everyone else a little nervous.
