Auburn Basketball Takes Their Two Game Win Streak into Gainesville to Face Florida

Auburn basketball is coming off their two biggest wins of the season with victories over Kentucky and Alabama at home in a span of four days. Now the Tigers (9-8, 3-3) look to carry their win streak into Gainesville to face the Florida Gators (12-6, 4-2). Auburn can credit the home crowd as a big factor in their two huge wins, so traveling to play Florida on the road will be a good test of where this Auburn basketball team is really at.

What a crazy week it has been for Auburn basketball and Auburn fans. This time last week I and many other fans were accepting the fact that the season was headed in the wrong direction fast. Auburn wasn’t expected to win many games for the rest of the season and were a 12 point underdog to Kentucky alone. However, despite the doubts of many, Auburn was able to feed off the energy of the home crowd and received much better play from Cinmeon Bowers on the way to wins in two of the most important games of the season.

The first and most obvious reason for the great performances has to be the home crowd. The Jungle and Auburn Arena were the loudest they’ve been all season and the energy was felt by the team, coaches, and media for the game. However, while the home crowd was a huge help, I give a lot of credit for the wins to the much improved play by Cinmeon Bowers. Bowers was re-inserted into the starting lineup after coming off the bench for the past few weeks.

Whether it was regaining the starting spot or just trying to backup his strong words made before the games, Bowers played his two best games of the year, back-to-back, against Auburn’s two biggest opponents. Bowers had 8 points and 10 rebounds against Kentucky and then exploded for 20 points and 18 rebounds against Alabama in 60 combined minutes.

As he as been for most of this season, with Auburn traveling away from Auburn Arena, Bowers will be a major key for the Tigers success. He’s shown that he got out of his slump and that he still deserves to be labeled as one of Auburn’s best players. In order for Auburn to keep the win streak alive, Bowers will have to have another good night.

Kareem Canty and Tyler Harris have been consistently good most of the season, but Bowers has been the wildcard. When he has played well, Auburn has usually gotten a win, while when Bowers has one of his bad games, there’s a lot more pressure, both scoring and rebounding, placed on Canty, Harris, and other players. Auburn needs their big three players to keep playing well together, but what are they up against in with Florida on Saturday?

The Florida Gators have established themselves as one of the better teams in the SEC. Florida was able to come out of their brutal non-conference schedule with only four losses to Purdue, Miami, Michigan State, and Florida State. The Gators were able to stay with these teams mostly because of their dominant defense.

Up until recently, the Gators have relied just on their defense and weren’t able to find much of an offensive game to go with it. That’s not so much the case anymore as senior forward Dorian Finney-Smith and freshman guard KeVaughn Allen have stepped up on the offensive end. The Gators have score 80 and 81 points in their two most recent SEC wins over Ole Miss and Mississippi State respectively. In those games Finney-Smith scored 17 and 20, while Allen scored 27 and 19.

Defense hasn’t been a strong point for Auburn this season, but they’ll have to at least try and keep one of Florida’s offensive stars in check. The good news is that Auburn has played some of its best defense against Kentucky and Alabama in the last two games, so it will be interesting to see how that continues on the road in Gainesville.

Expect to see a nice matchup between two freshmen as KeVaughn Allen and Bryce Brown face off. Brown has established himself as one of Auburn’s better defenders but as many know he can also score a good bit of points when he gets going. Allen will have a slight edge on his home court and has been slightly more impressive over the last few games, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Brown finds a way to get out of his shooting slump against the Gator’s tough defense.

The key for Auburn against Florida is staying close and limiting turnovers. While Florida has a stout defense, the offense doesn’t have the ability to go on large runs quite like Kentucky did. If Auburn can score consistently and respond Florida’s runs with offensive runs of their own, the Tigers can have a shot to win this towards the end.

I don’t expect Auburn to continue playing as well as the past two games while they are in Gainesville, but if the team can keep it close, Kareem Canty and others have proved that they can finish a game strong. Even a close loss with no more injuries will be fine with much more winnable games against Ole Miss and Oklahoma State coming up next.

Auburn is playing some of their best basketball at this point in the season, but the Tigers are still dealing with quite a few roster issues. On their last road trip, Auburn wasn’t able to all play well together, which resulted in two ugly losses to Missouri and Vanderbilt. Hopefully that won’t be the case this time around, but Florida is probably a better team than both Missouri and Vanderbilt and they play in front of one of the better home court advantages in the SEC.

Auburn has shown me that they can win with a smaller roster, but I don’t think they can sustain quite the level of play of their last two wins on the road. Despite playing much better on their road trip this time, Auburn basketball falls to Florida 60-72.