Everything Nate Oats said after Alabama's 110-54 win over UNC Asheville

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – No. 2 Alabama dominated UNC Asheville, 110-54, in its season opener on Monday at Coleman Coliseum. After the Crimson Tide’s win, head coach Nate Oats spoke to local reporters. Here is everything Oats said during his postgame press conference.

Oats’ opening statement…

“I thought it was a good opening night for us. It’s the first time we’ve had all these guys available. I thought it was a good game for some guys to get their feet wet. I thought our start defensively was great. I thought Mark Sears’ defensive effort was significantly better than what was last year. You guys can all see it. The one possession, we can end up finishing it well, we foul a 3-point shooter, but just his effort on the ball. I love the fact that the crowd recognized how hard he was playing on defense, got into it. 

“First off, the crowd was unbelievable. It’s the best crowd we’ve had for an opener since I’ve been here. It was a sellout. We need to keep continuing like that. So a huge thank you to the student section, I heard we had more students wanted to come than we had room for, which is great. We need that to be that way every game. Thankful to all the season ticket holders that couldn’t make it that got people in their seat.s So that was great. 

“But we got some young guys that we need to get some experience. I thought Labaron looked great. He had nine assists, almost had a double-double. He needed one more assist. Aiden Sherrell won the Hard Hat. He had nine rebounds in limited minutes. Derrion Reid had some big-time plays, too. He had nine and six, and I thought he started getting more comfortable. He had that three and made his free throws there. 

“So I’m really happy with the effort from everybody, but obviously the games are gonna get a little tougher here moving forward.”

Oats on what stood out about Aden Holloway’s performance…

“That’s pretty impressive. Shoot, I think my favorite play he had when he got on the floor for that loose ball that we scored off after he got on the floor for that. He’s making some tough plays, showing he’s got some toughness. He can really be a good defensive guard. He’s got the quickness to be a great defensive guard. And he’s not passing up open threes. I think you saw he’s capable of shooting it. He’s got range. We don’t want him passing up any open shots ever. He went 2-of-3 from three. Him and Sears both shot really well. They’re really the only two guys that shot it decent. 

“We didn’t shoot it great from three tonight, outside of those two. And Mo Dioubate went 1-for-1, too, which is good. He’s been working a lot on this game. He’s a tough kid that makes tough plays. But I was really happy with Holloway. I mean, 11 points, didn’t have a turnover. Kind of questions that maybe came up were with some of the stuff in practice, maybe some exhibitions where we need him to be a better defender and need him to take care of the ball. I thought he was pretty good on defense. I thought he took care of the ball. We know he could shoot it and he shot it really well tonight.”

Oats on how much better equipped is this team to be good defensively in terms of length…

“You saw it early in the game. They couldn’t get shot off. I mean, we were blocking shots. Labaron had a block. Derrion had a block, Jarin Stevenson. I mean, look down the list. We had four different guys that had blocks with Jarin, Derrion, Labaron’s got length at the guard spot and Cliff’s obviously a big-time rim protector. He had two blocks tonight. Then we also got guys that – Mo Dioubate’s got length. Grant Nelson’s got length. I think we can be a great defensive team if we continue to keep the right mindset. We held them to a 0.74, which is good, very good. I mean, I think we can be better. We gave up too many O boards. We fouled 3-point shooters twice, which isn’t good defense. But I thought it was a good first game.”

Oats on different lineup combos from a forward standpoint…

“We tried to get everybody decent minutes. We only had two guys go over 24 minutes, barely over 24 with Holloway and Sears, and everybody played at least 15 minutes. So I thought it was pretty good. Everybody’s between 15 and 24, so we were able to see, like you said, Aiden Sherrell, Jarin Stevenson, Mo Dioubate, Grant Nelson, Cliff. Derrion Reid kind of can play some three, four. I think we’ve got a lot of different ways we can go with that and put really good shooting on the floor, Aiden Sherrell at the five. Grant and Jarin Stevenson – Jarin’s been shooting it really well. 

“And those guys all have some toughness to them, too. You can go with some really tough, defensive-minded groups. We’ve got Cliff and Mo Dioubate, Derrion Reid who can kind of put at the three, as well as the four. We’ve got some versatility. I think we tried a little bit of everything out there, and we’ll continue to try different lineups together. Different guys seem to play better with each other. I thought they all played pretty well together tonight, to be honest with you.”

Oats on Mark Sears, others supporting Alabama’s women’s basketball team…

“I think it’s great. Our guys are here, they’re college students. They’re trying to partake in the college experience. Mark’s one of the guys that’s already graduated, could have chosen to go. He’d be playing the G League at a minimum if he didn’t make an NBA team. He chose to come back to win a national championship for his home state team. He enjoys being in college student like most of our guys do. Our guys show up, support the football team. It’s nice that the women were able to play right before us, so we could show up and support them. It’s great that a guy like Mark’s notoriety is here supporting the women. And got different guys at soccer games, baseball games, softball, whatever it is. I think it’s great. We encourage our guys to be college students. Not just athletes, but student-athletes and support their fellow student-athletes.”

Oats on if this is what he expected from Cliff Omoruyi…

“Yeah, we were going to try to limit his minutes to a lot less than what he played at Rutgers just because our pace is so much faster and he needs to be super explosive in his minutes. The bigger games, he’ll probably play more than 19 minutes than he did tonight, but 16 and eight in under 19 minutes is pretty efficient basketball. So I don’t know that I’m going to expect 16 and eight in 19 minutes every night, but whether the minutes end up being 20-25, whatever, we expect him – he’s 6-of-6 from the floor, 4-of-4 at the free throw line, two blocks, eight rebounds. That’s a pretty efficient night in 19 minutes. It doesn’t get much more efficient than that. So it is similar to what we expected out of him, but we expect a lot of our frontcourt guys to finish at a solid rate at the rim. So happy to see him play so well in his first game here for us.”

Oats on the offense, ball movement…

“I thought once we settled in, it got a lot better. We had way too many turnovers. I think we had nine assists, eight turnovers in the first half. Turned it around, 12 assists, two turnovers in the second half. Labaron to have nine assists as a freshman, it’s pretty impressive. He even got Max Scharnowski his bucket there at the end. So we gotta get his turnovers cut down. He had four turnovers, which is way too many. But he’s trying. We got a lot of unselfish guys. I mean, Mark Sears has been passing the ball really well. He didn’t end up with a ton of assists today, but I think he’s had a lot of assists in practice. He’s moving the ball. Mark, Holloway, Wrightsell, Labaron. Saw Grant Nelson really trying to pass the ball. He wasn’t as aggressive to score as he’s gonna get once he gets where he feels comfortable and healthy. But he’ll get the rust knocked off. 

“And that’s the other thing you gotta realize, is Wrightsell, Aiden Sherrell and Grant really haven’t played for, some of them, over a month or a few weeks. So this is a good game to get the rest knocked off. I was happy to see Wrightsell hit that three coming off. It looked a lot more like what he’s capable of doing. So l thought the ball moved well. I think we got a lot of guys – talked a lot about Mudita the second half of last season. I thought we had it. Guys were happy for each other on the bench, happy for each other in the game.”

Oats on Alabama’s play style, a la points in the paint vs. 3-pointers attempted…

“People ask me all the time, ‘How many threes is ideal for your team?’ Well, we’ve averaged about 30 every year I’ve been here. So look, we’ll take 50. We’ll take 18. Whatever the defense is giving us, we’re gonna take. We’re going to try to be the most efficient team in the country. We were the second-most efficient team in the country last year behind UConn. We were No. 1 for most of the year and Trelly got hurt. Trelly was the fourth-most efficient player in the country. When he got hurt, we slipped from first to second. 

“So if we’ve got a distinct advantage in the paint, like we did tonight, we’ll go to it. Other teams are going to have really good defenders in the paint or they’re going to collapse to make sure that we’re – I wouldn’t know how teams are going to guard us. But some teams going to look at this game, ‘We got to really keep them out of the paint.’ Cliff’s scoring 16 in a short amount of (minutes) and Labaron’s getting in the paint whenever he wants and guys are driving. If they collapse, we’ll spray it and take 46 threes. 

“So I don’t think we’re going to try to necessarily change our plan style, but we definitely have some lob targets. You saw Derrion catch a lob there late. Cliff’s a big-time lob target. We threw him a couple lobs. Aiden Sherrell can be one. He can be a pick-and-pop guy, a roll guy. And Jarin and Grant can both get in the lane and finish in the paint. I thought you saw Jarin show some physicality on his drives that he maybe didn’t show last year. I thought he did a great job showing some paint patience and being physical on his drives. Mo Dioubate is super physical. We got some guys that can score it in the paint. So if they’re gonna give us 56 points in the pain, we’ll take them.”

Oats on the decisions to redshirt Houston Mallette, Naas Cunningham…

“Houston came to us with some knee issues, and he didn’t practice all summer. He’s an unbelievable kid. I’m super happy he’s in our program. We talk about high-character kids; he’s at the top of that list. But we wanted to do what was right by him and give him a full offseason in our program. We play so much different than what he played at Pepperdine. He’s trying to be a pro, and without having the offseason, I think we didn’t put him behind the eight-ball playing him this year. So we had a long discussion with him, his father and decided what would be best is him really learn how we want to play, have an entire year and a half with us now going into his year with us next year. He’s gonna make us great practice. He’s gonna make us great on a bench. He’s gonna make us great just being in the program.

“And then Naas, we kind of took that one all the way up until this past weekend. He’s gotta get more physical. He’s gotta put some weight on depth. We weren’t sure how many minutes he was going to play some of these games. So again, with him – and we talked, there’s been different guys. Preston Murphy, coached one at Creighton, Justin Patton, redshirted to put on weight, and he played one year and left after one year after redshirting. So we still think Nas has ridiculously high upside. He’s a 6-7, 6-8 guard. He shoots it really well with all kinds of athleticism. He’s just got to put on a lot of weight and figure out kind of how we play. 

“So we just thought it’d be smart. With Naas particularly, if you’re playing in a game, you can’t really lift. He’s got to lift, get his diet, his nutrition the way it needs to be. He can lift the day before a game, the day of the game. You can really focus on putting some weight on so he’s a lot more physical to play for us next year.”

Oats on the intensity Alabama showed in Game 1…

“I thought we brought it with the intensity. I think there’s plenty of stuff we need to clean up. But as far as effort and all that stuff goes, I thought it was really good. I thought our guys played hard. There’s never gonna be perfect games. It wasn’t perfect, but I was happy. You look at Mark Sears is preseason player of the year in a lot of publications, you look at the effort he gave on defense. Probably should have put him on Marsh, to be honest with you. He probably did the best job on Marsh than anybody. So it’d be nice if sometimes you can take your best player and put him on the opposing team’s best player, because he’s your best defender on the perimeter. 

“I think he’s got a lot better effort on the defensive end. Labaron had great effort on the defensive end. I think I referenced earlier, but Holloway dives on the floor in the middle of paint with all the bigs and takes out a loose ball and we score off it. But those are those kind of plays we’re looking for, and when you get them out of your guards that are also super skilled, I think that – because we know we’re going to get toughness and physicality out of Dioubate, Cliff and Derrion Reid and some of those guys. To get out of our guards, too, I thought was big.”

Oats on Labaron Philon’s performance, development…

“LeBaron came in right out of the gate when we got the guys here in June, established himself as one of the best two-way guards in the program. I mean, he’s been guarding. He takes that role as a two-way guy very seriously. We weren’t sure how many minutes he was gonna play when we first got him. Within the first month of him being here, we knew he’s gonna be in the rotation, and then he’s just continued to establish himself – shoot, he had nine assists today. I mean, he’s a guy that could very easily end up with a triple-double this year at some point if we’re able to give him enough minutes with how he passes it and how hard he plays on defense. 

“He’s got to do a better job rebounding on the defenseman, particularly. I thought he came up a couple of the night. But he’s going to be very good. I think he’s got a chance to play at the next level. They’re looking for two-way guys. If he shoots it like we think hhe’s capable of shooting it this year, I think he’s got a chance to be a pro, an NBA pro. And I think that’s what he’s looking for. That’s our goal, is to get him there, and he’s going to help us win all the games this year.”

Not a member, Alabama fans? Join BOL today!

Have you subscribed to BamaOnLine.com yet? You can sign up for ONE MONTH of premium access to our Alabama coverage for just $11.99! Be able to read all of BOL’s premium articles and nuggets covering Alabama sports and recruiting and also join thousands of other Crimson Tide fans around the globe on the BOL Round Table message board! CLICK HERE!