Nate Oats responds to whether Alabama considered changing tempo vs. Kentucky

Alabama could’ve changed tempo against Kentucky to get a different outcome. However, Nate Oats said that wouldn’t have made the difference in the loss to the Wildcats.

Oats put it on turnovers and transition defense. Without those two things clicking, Alabama had no shot against Kentucky.

Oats said his team gave the Wildcats way too much fuel in the 117-95 loss.

“We knew transition defense was key to the game, and we knew if we turned it over, it was gonna fuel their transition,” Oats said. “So I didn’t have a third point guard to point that wasn’t gonna turn it over. It would have helped having Latrell Wrightsell, but he wasn’t gonna make up 22 points tonight. But he is shooting it better than the rest of our guys and taking care of the ball better than the rest of them, so it would have helped to have him. It certainly wasn’t gonna make a difference today. 

“We needed everybody to play a lot better. I’m not sure what else I would have done to change up. We’re certainly not gonna walk the ball up the floor. And I don’t know if that would have helped anyways with turning the ball over more, probably.”

Oats clarified that the turnovers in the game weren’t because of transition. It was just sloppy offense.

“Most of our turnovers weren’t transition turnovers,” Oats said. “They were just careless passes, being careless with the ball, throwing it straight to the other team in pick-and-roll. I’d have to go through the 16 turnovers to tell you all of them. But yeah, we knew that they were dangerous in transition. We knew we couldn’t turn it over. We turned over, and I felt like we had too many guys not give us an effort to get back in transition, get matched up and they made us pay. We suspected that they would if we didn’t do a good job.”

The theme remained the same. Oats just wanted better ball protection.

“Kentucky was ready to play today, and we weren’t,” Oats said. “Cal had his guys ready to go. I didn’t. They looked great. We looked awful. Our defensive intensity was not good. I told our guys after the game, we’ve had question marks all year. Those question marks are completely erased today. 

“Everybody knows that we don’t really guard at this point because our effort stunk. Part of the issue was we turned it over, and 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 taking care of the ball.”