Frazier II sets SEC record, school record with 11 3-pointers
Down by just two at halftime to the No. 1 team in the nation, the South Carolina men’s basketball team turned in about as strong of an effort as you could ask for in the early stages Tuesday night.
But the Gators defended their status as the best outfit in the country in the second half, pulling away to win 72-46, crushing the Gamecocks’ hopes of pulling off another upset.
“At halftime, even though we were in a two-point game, I didn’t feel good,” coach Frank Martin said. “I just didn’t see us having the fuel in the tank that you’ve got to have to sustain 40 minutes of the effort that you have to play to defeat them.”
After finishing the first half down 26-28, the wheels fell off for South Carolina. The Gators opened the second period on an 11-2 run and would go on to outscore the Gamecocks 44-20 in the half.
Florida is typically a team that distributes its scoring relatively evenly with no clear-cut star on the roster, so no one could have predicted the performance guard Michael Frazier II turned in Tuesday.
The sophomore scored a career-high 37 points and was the only Gator to break double digits, but the number that stands out is his three-point tally. Frazier made 11 threes to break not only Florida’s school record for a single game, but the all-time SEC record.
“I thought we were late to him every single time,” Martin said. “We obviously didn’t express to our players that Michael Frazier shoots the basketball. That obviously wasn’t communicated as well as it needed to be communicated.”
Sophomore forward Mindaugas Kacinas led the Gamecocks in scoring Tuesday night with 12 points. He also finished with eight rebounds, the second best on the team, finishing behind fellow Lithuanian sophomore Laimonas Chatkevicius’s nine boards.
Guard Brenton Williams received senior night honors before the game as the only senior on the South Carolina roster. He was joined by Bruce Ellington, who decided to forgo his final basketball season as he readies for the NFL draft.
Williams has made a career out of the three-point shot, but he was only able to scrape together seven points by launching up a couple of miraculous shots against the Gators — a testament, he said, to the defensive effort Florida turned in against him on the day.
“That was by far the best defense I’ve seen,” Williams said. “They did a pretty good job of communicating as a team where I was at on the floor at all times from what I saw on the court.”
In Williams’ final game at Colonial Life Arena, he went just two-for-nine from the field and added two steals, an assist and a rebound.
With just one regular season game left to play for Williams and his career at his home venue in the rear view, Martin was able to reflect on his lone senior’s time in the program.
“This university has served him well. It’s helped him grow as a human being. It’s made him a better person and a better player,” Martin said. “And he has served this university back by sacrificing of himself and representing us the right way.”
South Carolina’s faint hope of toppling the No. 1 team in the country was alive and well halfway through Tuesday’s game. But the Gators aren’t where they are this year for no reason.
And as Martin watched his Gamecocks slip further and further out of contention, he realized that pulling a second upset was too tall an order for his young South Carolina team.
“My concern going into this game was all the energy and emotion that we had to put into Saturday — would we have the resolve and the inner strength to have to do it again, and to a greater degree on Tuesday?” Martin said. “We tried, but we gave into fatigue, and you can’t win when you give in to fatigue.”