Florida vs. LSU, Game Thread: Gators seek to right ship against Tigers

The Florida Gators and the LSU Tigers meet in the O’Connell Center this evening (6:30 p.m., SEC Network or WatchESPN), and I wish I could tell you I really cared about giving you a deep and textured preview of this basketball game, but that just is not the truth.

LSU has a couple of good players in the mercurial Tremont Waters and lanky Duop Reath, but LSU is not a consistently good basketball team and has proven that over and over, getting just scattered decent wins out of its first season under Will Wade and failing to put together more than a three-game winning streak so far this year.

Wade is too good a coach and recruiter for that to remain the case for long — certainly, this LSU team is much better than Johnny Jones’s final Tigers were, and no one should expect a 40-point blowout like the one Florida laid on that LSU outfit tonight — but a loss to the Tigers would be damaging for Florida, and Florida knows that.

And Florida is good enough, despite its recent skid, to get a win. LSU doesn’t have the same sort of rugged defense that Georgia and Alabama did, and so it shouldn’t be as hard for the Gators to get threes on this evening.

That’s the simple means of looking at this one.

And I know you care way more about football today, anyway.