Everything Nate Oats said after Alabama's 79-75 win over No. 8 Auburn

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Alabama men’s basketball team defeated No. 8 Auburn, 79-75, on Wednesday night at Coleman Coliseum. After the Crimson Tide’s first win over a ranked foe this season, head coach Nate Oats spoke to reporters. Below is everything that he said.

Oats’ opening statement…

“Shoot, that’s a good team. They’re really good. We didn’t come out ready to play. They punched us in the mouth out the gate. We’ve got to figure our starts out. We have not had good starts here for a long time. Rylan (Griffen) was really good off the bench. I think we needed him. It’s kind of like we needed a big burst. He came in, gave us a big punch. It’s kind of exactly what we wanted. I thought (Latrell Wrightsell) was pretty good as a starter. We’re trying to get some guys to take care of the ball. We had a couple more ball handlers out there as starters. We still had too turnovers tonight.

“But I thought we showed some toughness that we lacked up in Tennessee. We showed some fight. We got down right out of the gate, showed some grit, fought through a little bit of adversity. And then we didn’t have a good start to the second half again and got some guys in off the bench and turned it around again in the second half and started to blow them out, and they didn’t go away. I mean, that’s a tough team that’s going to compete. They’re still in first place in our league. So big win we needed, but we’ve got to get better at a lot of things here.”

Oats on the early light malfunction / how to channel the team’s competitiveness…

“We’ve got all new lights in there. That’s never happened. They didn’t flip over from the red to the regular lights, and we were trying to figure out if we could play in the dark. Then we had to make sure that both ends had the same lighting or it wouldn’t have been fair. So we were trying to figure all that and keep the guys warm. It was odd. I’ve never been involved with something like that.

“And then the competing part, to see a guy like Wrightsell have nine rebounds, a guy like Rylan Griffen came up big. He ends up being a +19 in the +/-, seven rebounds for him. Grant (Nelson) had his first double-double. I thought Jarin Stevenson really grew up these last two games. I thought he was one bright spot at Tennessee, too, to be honest with you. He guarded in there pretty well. I thought he was big. It’s not like he scored a bunch of points or anything, but he’s +12 when he’s in the game. He played 22 minutes. 

“So we had some guys really step up, compete. Some other guys didn’t play well. We’ve been talking a lot about Mudita after Coach (Patrick) Murphy talked to the team. I thought they were genuinely happy for the guys that were playing well, and we’re going to need some of those guys to play better on Saturday and continuing in order to win the SEC like we’re trying to do.”

Oats on bouncing back after losing at Tennessee…

“I think it shows we do have some fight. We do have some guys that have some competitive juices to them. Look at a guy like Rylan and (Mark) Sears. I think we’ve got some guys that don’t want to lay down and just take Ls. I told them our responses to some losses last year were 60- and 50-point wins. We weren’t going to hit a 60- or 50-point win over the No. 6 team in the country, but we were going to need an effort like we got after some losses last year to get a win period this year. Shoot, it was basically a one-possession game down to the wire. It took a monumental effort, and we were a lot of tougher than we were against Tennessee.

“…  The crowd was unbelievable. We needed the crowd tonight. They showed up in a big way. The noise levels got big. I think our guys play off the crowd. We need the crowd show up on Saturday. We need every home game in the SEC to look like that if we’re going to try to win this thing. We’re tied for first place right now, so we’re going after it again.”

Oats on Rylan Griffen’s mindset coming off the bench…

“It shows he’s all about the team and whatever he needs to do to help the team win. I’ve had players – shoot, up at Buffalo, Nick Perkins was three-time MAC Sixth Man of the Year. He was arguably our best player and came off the bench. Some guys get a comfort level. Some of these guys want to be pros, they’re going to have to come off the bench as a pro. It’s not the worst to figure it out. (Jahvon) Quinerly was great off the bench. As a matter of fact, Rylan I think talked to JQ about how it is to play off the bench either earlier today or yesterday. I think Rylan had the right attitude – just come in and be ready to go. 

“I talked to Rylan’s dad yesterday about just kind of explaining to him, and he’s good with it. He’s great. I said I anticipate him having an unbelievable game. I thought he had our best practice. I kind of moved him with the second unit in practice, and they actually beat the first unit in practice, and he was very good. If he’s going to keep playing like this, maybe we can be able to keep bringing him off the bench.”

Oats on Grant Nelson’s second half, how it can help his confidence…

“That reverse, and-1 dunk, getting the tipped dunk and the tough offensive rebounds, getting fouled and going to the free-throw line, making big free throws for us. He’s a 6-11 kid that goes to the line and makes over 90 percent. He’s 8-for-9 tonight. We needed him to play like that, and he needed that for his confidence. He needed to know he could go against a top-10 team in the country, get a double-double. He doesn’t have to make threes to impact the game. 

“I’m good with him shooting open threes, and he’s going to make some here and there and help us win a big game with one, similar to (Noah) Clowney last year. Clowney shot under 30 percent from three. He made some big ones when it mattered, but he impacted the game in a lot of ways – offensive rebounds, defensive stops, defensive rebounds. I think Grant is starting to figure that out. I was super fired up for him on some of those tough plays he made.”

Oats on Nelson and the rest of the team’s interior defense…

“(Johni) Broome is a monster. He had 24 and 14. We didn’t really have a good matchup for him. All of our bigs struggled with him. We had four guys take turns guarding him between Grant, Nick (Pringle), Mo (Wague) and Jarin. I thought Jarin actually did a halfway decent job. He didn’t get too many reps on him. But in the first half particularly, he was going to work on our guys. We have to do better. We’ve struggled guarding bigs here. We’ve got enough guys with size. They’ve got to get better. But Grant did a great job on Tolu Smith at Mississippi State. We need that kind of effort out of him. It wasn’t that way in the first half, but I thought it came a lot better in the second half. I thought his first-half to second-half splits were much better.”

Oats on Griffen challenging Nelson during the game…

“The best teams I’ve ever coached are player-coached teams, to be honest with you. I know we give them some direction, put them in the right system, but that stuff, the best teams you have, that stuff comes from the players. So it was great that Rylan stepped up. He basically told Grant we need you. ‘We need to play tough. You’re good enough. We need you to step it up.’ He stepped it up. After the game, Rylan kind of raised his hand. ‘Coach, let me say something. Grant, way to step it up.’ 

“We’ve been talking about this. We need some leadership. We need some guys to play so hard every possession that when somebody else isn’t playing hard, it doesn’t fit in. And then you challenge them and they fit in with how hard we play. I thought today was a big step in that, and Rylan has been playing pretty hard on defense. He was really locked in today, both sides of the ball.”

Oats on the next step for the team’s leadership….

“It’s Rylan continuing to do what we did. Guys accepting it when their teammates challenge them. A guy like Sears, who’s been in these big games and been in big moments for us, needs to keep playing. I thought he’s been playing pretty hard here later. He needs to keep playing hard like he’s been playing and then make sure that everybody else is following. You don’t need one leader. All of our good teams have had a multitude of leaders, whether it’s Rylan, Sears, Nick Pringle is very vocal. He’s played better, but I thought his attitude on the bench…

“We need some guys, those guys that have been here and we need some other guys that have played college basketball and done really well to step up. I think if Grant can be tough every time out, he could start to step up and say some things. I thought the guys have done a really good job bringing Jarin along. He’s young, supposed to be a senior in high school, and he’s coming. We need him. I think the guys have done a really good encouraging him, really getting him to play tough. To me, this was his toughest game. He played well tonight.”

Oats on offensive rebounds, second-chance points…

“It was huge. To have a guy like Wrightsell lead us in offensive boards at the guard spot with four, Grant had three and Sears went in and got two, Wague in limited minutes had two. The way we play, we take a lot of threes. We took 30 tonight. But you’re going to have games when you don’t shoot it well. So you’ve got to be able to win the game other ways. I told the guys, we had poor shooting games here in non-conference. 

“I went through and read off stats where we’ve shot it very poorly from three and still won big games. Take care of the ball, get to the free-throw line, make free throws and you win the rebounding battle. So you’ve got to go get second-chance points. Now, the turnovers, we’ve got to figure out. We’re getting better on the offensive glass. We are getting to the line, making free throws at a decent clip. But turnovers are our biggest issue right now. We’ve got to get those figured out here soon.”

Oats on how much better Auburn is than last year’s team…

“They’re a lot better. They’ve got veteran guys that are playing well. (Aden) Holloway is one of the best – we were fortunate Holloway struggled because he’s one of the best guards in the country, in my opinion. I think they’re a lot better team than last year. We’ll see a better version of them. If we play like we did tonight, we’ll lose at their place. We’re going to be extremely happy, excited we got the win. We’re in first place. We’ve got to work on between now and then. They’re a good team. They’re going to play better at home. 

“Holloway is going to play better. They had multiple guys. (Jaylin) Williams is 7-for-10, he’s 70 percent in conference play coming in. He went 0-for-3. We were fortunate that they didn’t shoot it well. They shot it better with the lights off. Maybe they should have requested to keep the lights off, but they wanted us to turn the lights on and they didn’t shoot it as well. Broome made that first one, but they’re going to shoot a lot better there. They play hard all the time. That crowd there is going to really get them amped up. We’re going to have to be better at their place than we were tonight, fore sure.”

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