Nate Oats breaks down Alabama’s loss vs. Kentucky

Kentucky drilled Alabama by 22 points in Rupp Arena on Saturday in an all-time offensive effort for them. That’s all Nate Oats needed to know in regards to how he assessed his team’s play in Lexington, especially on the defensive end.

Oats called it like he saw it to start his postgame press conference after the 117-95 loss. He said it was clear that UK was ready to play and that, in comparison, the Crimson Tide clearly weren’t.

“I mean Kentucky was ready to play tonight. We weren’t,” said Oats in his opening statement. “Cal had his guys ready to go. I didn’t. They looked great. We looked awful.”

All of that disapproval from Oats came down to his team’s defense. He felt that they played so poorly on that end that they answered their defensive questions considering they proved that they just won’t defend.

“Our defensive intensity? I told our guys after the game that we’ve had question marks about our defense all year. Those question marks are completely erased. Everybody knows that we don’t really guard at this point,” said Oats. “Just thought our effort stunk.”

When Oats looked at the numbers, no aspect of their defense pleased him. Sixteen turnovers got the Wildcats out and running to score in transition before they even got a shot to defend them straight up. They then weren’t much better in the halfcourt as Kentucky erupted by shooting 63.1% from the field and 54.2% from three on 13 makes.

“Part of the issue was we turned it over. They scored 29 points off our 16 turnovers. You can’t turn the ball over that much. Our starting backcourt had too many turnovers. We need to do a better job tagging them, taking care of the ball,” Oats said. “Giving up 16 points in transition, not including the points off turnovers? You take the 29 points off turnovers, 16 other points in transition. All of a sudden, you’re at 45 points before you even give your halfcourt defense a chance to get a stop.

“Then, once they got in the halfcourt, I didn’t think we were great in that area either. Kentucky shot the ball pretty well. We’re the team that’s supposed to be able to shoot and they shot it twice as good as we did. They gave up 54% from three, we gave up 63% from the field,” Oats added. “Any kind of decent defense was played in the last eight minutes when I thought the game was already over when, I’m guessing, Kentucky probably was coasting to the end.”

Oats knows there’s essentially nothing good to take during a game where your team faced a 37-point deficit.

The only beneficial aspect is that his team had a one-game lead coming into that matchup. Now, in a tie for the top spot in the conference, Oats is going to do all he can to improve Alabama’s defense in the final stretch over these next two weeks in order to still potentially win the league.

“There’s not a whole lot of positives about this,” Oats said. “The only positive thing is we played well enough on offense through the course of the year to be tied for first place after that horrendous effort. We’ve got four games left and we’ve got to try and figure out how to get these guys a little more motivated to play harder on defense.”