Nate Oats breaks down how Alabama can limit turnovers, second chance points

Alabama head coach Nate Oats wants his team to limit turnovers and capitalize on second opportunities. Unfortunately for the Crimson Tide, they didn’t do that Saturday against Tennessee.

The 91-71 loss dropped Alabama to 12-6 on the season. Basically without hammering home the fundamentals, Oats’ crew might fall short in situations like this.

He gave a lengthy explanation as far as second chance opportunities were concerned.

“The second chances, obviously, you’ve got to box out and rebound,” Oats said. “You’ve got to have five guys that are willing to mix it up on the defensive glass. Now, we actually cleaned up the rebounding issue a little bit in the second half, but part of that was they just kept going to the free-throw line because we were just making some dumb fouls. So they didn’t miss as many field goals in the second half to get offensive rebounds.”

That’s when Oats discussed the turnovers, limiting them and so on and so forth. However, the Alabama coach didn’t think it was a large issue.

“But as far as the turnovers go, we didn’t have an issue,” Oats said. “I think we were averaging 12 on the year going into this game. In conference play, they’ve been bad. Shoot, Mark (Sears) is our primary ball handler, and he had seven tonight. He’s got to be better. He wasn’t very good against Missouri with the turnovers. We’ve got to get him to get guys outlets to get it out when he’s faced some pressure. 

“Rylan (Griffen), who doesn’t handle it a ton for us, had five tonight. We’ve got to get those guys that aren’t necessarily handling it a ton – we can’t have Rylan having five turnovers. But it’s a combination of them being smarter, better with the ball, stronger with the ball and guys giving them outlets when they’re getting trapped and pressured and a combination of two. We’ve got to clean up turnovers.”

It wasn’t necessarily an issue, but the turnovers still have to be cleaned up for Oats and Alabama. With Auburn on deck, the Crimson Tide have to turn around in a hurry.

“Good thing is it’s one game,” Oats said after the loss. “I told our guys when we lost up here last year and still won the league. We’re going to have to get a lot tougher. They exposed some of our softness. I thought after this game, we did get a lot tougher and played a lot better after we lost up here last year. 

“So hopefully, that same thing happens. We’ll see if some guys show some character and come back ready to play a little tougher brand of basketball.”