Alabama basketball falls to 6-5 after loss to No. 4 Arizona in Phoenix
The Alabama men’s basketball team dropped its third straight game, losing to No. 4 Arizona, 87-74, on Wednesday night in Phoenix’s Footprint Center. All three losses were to teams in the AP Top 25 Poll’s top 10, but the Crimson Tide now has a 6-5 record on the season.
HOW IT HAPPENED
Alabama scored the first nine points of the game before a pair of Caleb Love free throws at the 16:18 mark. Arizona missed its first six shots, and the Crimson Tide cleaned up those misses – as well as its own – recording seven offensive rebounds in the first four minutes. UA was strong on the defensive end to begin the contest but couldn’t buy a bucket. Following an Aaron Estrada trey in the first three minutes, the Tide missed its next 13 shots from deep, and Arizona took its first lead in the final four minutes of the first half. The Wildcats went to the locker room with a 41-40 lead thanks in part to an abysmal shooting start (3-22 from 3).
Shots started to fall after intermission, though, particularly for Grant Nelson, who was 0-for-7 from 3-point range in the first 20 minutes. The senior’s first make fueled a 10-0 run that forced an Arizona timeout and gave the Crimson Tide a 50-43 advantage. But beginning at the 15:12 mark, the Wildcats went on a 19-3 run to take a 64-54 lead over the next 7-plus minutes. Turnovers by Alabama didn’t help the team’s cause as it turned the ball over nine times during that span. Two Nelson free throws snapped a UA scoring drought of 4:35.
Mark Sears drained a much-needed three to trim the deficit to 69-61 with 6:22 remaining, but both of the Tide’s bigs, Nick Pringle and Mo Wague, fouled out after that. Estrada made a pair of free throws and Rylan Griffen finished strong on a drive to the rim to make it a 6-point game at 78-72, but Love answered with six straight points on back-to-back buckets and two makes at the charity stripe to push it back to 12 points. The Wildcats ballooned their lead to 15 points as the nation’s fourth-ranked team bounced back after losing to Purdue.
PLAYERS OF THE GAME
All five of Arizona’s starters scored in double figures. Oumar Ballo tallied a double-double with 16 points and 12 rebounds. Pelle Larson also scored 16 points, while Kylan Boswell (15), Love (13) and Keshad Johnson (11) rounded out the Wildcats lineup. Nelson paced Alabama with 17 points but was 3-of-15 from the three. Freshman Sam Walters scored 15 points and was 3-of-5 from deep. Sears (12 points) and Estrada (11) also scored in double figures, while Wague led the Tide in rebounds with seven before fouling out of his third straight game.
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KEY STATS
Nate Oats wanted his team to shoot a lot of threes to try and spread the Wildcats out, and sure, Alabama did that with 40 attempts. But it only made eight of them and finished with an average of 20 percent from beyond the arc. Arizona went 4-of-17 (24 percent) from deep. The Tide shot 34 percent (22-of-65) from the field compared to 43 (28-of-65) for Arizona. The Wildcats out-rebounded the Tide, 48-38, and scored 14 more points in the paint (42-28). Alabama turned the ball over a season-high 18 times, which led to 26 points for Arizona. On the other hand, the Wildcats turned it over 14 times but UA only scored seven points.
QUOTE FROM OATS
“Another good game against a quality team that we just weren’t quite good enough. I thought the first half, we played pretty well. Big points of emphasis were keeping them off the free-throw line and winning the rebounding battle. First half, we were pretty good at both. Second half, they shoot 27 free throws and we shoot eight. So we didn’t do a very good job keeping them off the free-throw line in the second half. We didn’t do a great job on a glass. We end up losing the glass by 10 points. And obviously, it didn’t help that we didn’t shoot it particularly well and we turned the ball too much.
“I thought their physicality bothered us. They’re a tough, physical, hard-playing group. They turned us over. After we built the lead there in the second half, they called the timeout. They came out. We turned it over again. They got some buckets. We lost our momentum there and never really gained it back. So we’ve got to be a little bit more mentally tough when stuff is not going our way and we’re missing shots, we’re turning it over. We’ve got to get back and get some stops on defense.”
WHAT’S NEXT
Alabama will return home to Coleman Coliseum on Saturday, Dec. 23, to play host to Eastern Kentucky. The penultimate non-conference game will tip off at 3 p.m. CT (SEC Network).
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