Alabama hits 3-point shooting stride in road Mississippi State win

STARKVILLE, Miss. — Nate Oats teams are known for shooting a high volume of 3-pointers, but so far this season, Alabama has made the 3-ball at the rate it expected to entering the season.

There are a number of reasons you can attribute to the lack of 3-point shooting success this year. Injuries are the main reason. Latrell Wrightsell, probably the team’s best shooter, suffered a season-ending injury back in November. Chris Youngblood, who’s turned into one of the team’s best shooters, missed the first month of the season with an injury and is just now looking 100 percent.

Houston Mallette has had to miss significant time and it now looks like Alabama will pursue a medical redshirt for him, so there’s another good shooter out of the picture. Add in the fact that Mark Sears‘ numbers are down from last year, and it’s not hard to see why the team is only shooting 33 percent from beyond the arc.

But in SEC play, Alabama has started to find its stroke from deep. The Crimson Tide is shooting 36 percent from beyond the arc in league play, which includes a phenomenal 15-of-31 (48 percent) shooting performance on the road in Starkville in an 88-84 win on Wednesday night. It was Alabama’s second-best shooting game of the year, only a few percentage points worse than the road Purdue game in November, but on nearly double the attempts.

“You look at the way we shot it from three, we try to recruit shooting because we shoot a lot of threes,” Oats said after the game. “But to go 15-of-31 in a road game was huge. Chris stepped up, made some big ones, a lot of big ones late in the game, too. He goes 7-of-10. Sears goes 3-of-5. Holloway is 3-of-7. Those are three main shooters, and they stepped up, made 13 threes between the three of those guys. So a lot of good plays from everybody.”

The secret to Alabama’s shooting success against Mississippi State was laid out clearly by Oats. He said earlier in the season that he needed to get the right players shooting the most shots, and with Youngblood fully healthy and Aden Holloway having fully adjusted to the new system and hitting his stride, that’s what he’s getting.

Sears, Youngblood and Holloway combined to shoot 13-for-22 from three, which is good for 59 percent. That’s an unbelievably good clip, and shows exactly how much the overall percentage can be boosted by the best shooters taking the majority of the shots.

Sears has always known he’s had the green light, but for Youngblood and Holloway, it took a few instances of Oats telling them to never pass up open looks for them to fully understand the role he wants them to play. Now that they’re starting to get it, the results are showing on the floor.

“We didn’t do that like we needed to all the time, but the biggest thing, the ball was moving. I thought guys hit shots,” Oats said. “When Youngblood’s open, he didn’t pass up many open looks. We need our shooters. I thought Holloway passed some open ones up. I told him he can’t pass – him, Sears, Youngblood can never pass up an open shot, ever. So Youngblood didn’t. I didn’t think Sears did either. He didn’t get very many open ones with the way they were guarding them. But guys being confident, stepping up, making big shots was big for us.”

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