Everything Nate Oats said after Alabama's 83-75 win over Creighton

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – No. 7-ranked Alabama defeated Creighton, 83-75, on Saturday night at Coleman Coliseum to advance to 8-2 on the 2024-25 season. Head coach Nate Oats spoke to reporters after the Crimson Tide’s victory at home. Below is everything Oats said.

Oats’ opening statement…

“Good win. That’s a good team. They’re gonna win a lot of games in the Big East. It wasn’t necessarily the prettiest game at times, but I thought our guys were resilient. We built the lead in the first half. Gotta give Creighton a ton of credit. They kept hammering away. I think they finished the first half on a 21-10 run. So we didn’t close like we needed to. They’re good. 

“Kalkbrenner is one of the better bigs in the country. He’s big. He’s got size. You got to pay attention to him in the post. I thought we had a decent plan that we executed for the most part. He still ended up with 18 points. Our pick-and-roll defense wasn’t great. They exposed it there in the second half. When we were trying to close the game, we gave up way too many threes. And Ashworth is one of the better guards in the country, and we fell asleep on some stuff with him. I thought for large parts of the game, we were good defensively, and then they’re so explosive that in short stints you fall asleep, and they make you pay. They had the 4-point play, multiple threes. Jackson McAndrew, we didn’t get that covered correctly. 

“Good win but a lot to build on. Got three more games before conference play. I think this will be a win that goes a long ways come March, which is why we schedule games like this. Appreciate them coming, scheduling the series. I think it’s good for both programs, and we get to learn a little bit from it. I think Youngblood played. He was supposed to be about 15, 16 minutes. He played 16 minutes, kind of knocking the rust off. It was good to see him hit the one three. I think he’ll shoot it a little bit better than he did tonight once he kind of gets in the flow and in a rhythm a little bit more, but it’s good to see him out there contributing to a win tonight.”

Oats on Labaron Philon’s defensive effort…

“He’s a great defender. He’s long. He’s athletic. He’s tough. He’s competitive. I thought him and Derrion Reid both did a good job. Again, Ashworth is one of those guys, you do a great job 95 percent of the time, and the five percent of the time you screw up, all of a sudden he’s got 20 points on you. He doesn’t miss free throws. He doesn’t miss too many open shots. I did think those guys were good. Again, when you’re relying on freshmen as much as we are right now, sometimes – we only had three guys in double-figure scoring and two of them were freshmen, Derrion and Labaron – they’re going to make some mistakes on the defensive end, and you just got to keep teaching them and getting better. But I think their intensity, their effort, their want to is at a really high level, and that goes a long ways. So I’m proud of both those guys tonight.”

Oats on Aiden Sherrell getting a lot of shots up…

“It was the old Moses Malone where you just keep tipping your own miss and keep missing. He had five offensive rebounds. I don’t know if all five of those came off his own misses, but you get a lot of shot attempts when you just keep jumping and missing the tip-ins. It was good to see him hit the three. He’s been a great kid. It’d been nice if a couple of the tip-ins had gone in. I think he could have tried to tip-dunked one or two of them. But he’s gonna keep coming. He’s a big body. We wanted to keep Cliff fresh. I thought Aiden was the next best guy to put on Kalkbrenner. Kalkbrenner ends up playing 36 minutes. Cliff only played 25 and kind of matched up the 25 minutes with the 36 and Aiden Sherrell’s 10 minutes was kind of that gap there. And I thought he did a decent job defensively on Kalkbrenner, which is what we wanted. And he had that three. I want him to keep taking every open three he gets. We just got to get him to finish a little bit better at the rim. But he’s coming along.”

Oats on Mark Sears getting back to doing what he does best…

“I hope so because I’ll say this: he had been outstanding in practice. Literally, leading into the Carolina game and since the Carolina game, I think he’s been really good, been locked in, practicing hard. He ended up leading us in blue-collar points, got the hard head tonight. I thought his effort was good. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I felt like – we tell our guys, ‘Just lose yourself in the game.’ He got really locked into just playing hard, playing the right way, doing the right things, and now all of a sudden, he’s got his best shooting nights, his highest scoring output. He’s getting to the rim. He makes free throws. He just lost himself in the game tonight playing the right way, and I thought he was really good. This is the best game, I think, we’ve seen on him since the season started. Hopefully, this kind of gets him going here.”

Oats on how pleased was he with Alabama’s rebounding…

“It was good. I thought it could have been better at times. Some of these were misses that we should have made, and then we’re getting the rebounds. But 17-5, pretty good. For 17-five, you’d like the second-chance points to be a lot bigger disparity. It was only 14-8, but they gave up some O boards and they just didn’t give up a score. So we did a good job on the glass. We outrebounded them by 14. But we do need to do a better job scoring on those O boards we get. But I thought the effort was pretty good for the most part. Some of the guys could give a little bit better effort, but I thought it was pretty good.” 

Oats on the confidence gained from this difficult 7-game stretch…

“I think it’s good. I think it may be the toughest seven-game stretch of anybody in the country in non-conference. We’ve scheduled pretty tough like this ever since I’ve been here. I think it’s the best way to prepare yourself for SEC play. So I think our guys will be ready. Now, we’ve got three more games, and they’re not easy. A road game at North Dakota is not going to be an easy game. Kent State and South Dakota State are both really good mid-major programs. Kent State is one of the best programs in the MAC, where I came from. They’ll be ready to go. They’ll be tough, physical. We we come back from Christmas, South Dakota State before we get into SEC play. So hopefully we can get a groove or rhythm offensively. 

“We’re not shooting it really well. We just looked at KenPom. Coach Pannone runs our offense. To be sixth in the country with as poor as we’re shooting right now is a tribute to the type of shots and some other stuff we’re doing. But we have to start to make some shots here. So hopefully these next three games will help us get there.

“But the seven-game stretch, I was pretty happy with it. It’d be nice to have those two losses back, particularly the Oregon one. To win that tournament, because we talk about winning championships, we were one possession shy of winning that thing. But we’re learning from all these games and there’s plenty of stuff we can learn from this game and be better for SEC play come January.”

Oats on what Alabama learned from being on the road for so long…

“I think it’s a little bit of all that. Definitely some chemistry being together on the road as long as we were. We were in Vegas for eight days. We’ve been on road trips. Even the semi-home game at Birmingham, we were up there the night before and kind of getting to know each other well. I think it’s a great group. Some guys didn’t play as well or play as many minutes. You look at Mo Dioubate and Houston were like the lower guys on the minutes lists. They’re unbelievable kids. They’re all about the team. And we have plenty of guys. So I think the chemistry was great. I think that the mental toughness is there. Tonight, we don’t shoot it very well at all from three and just finding ways to win games when you don’t shoot it particularly well. We did get to the O boards and forced some turnovers. Our points off turnovers, we about doubled them. 

“So I think there’s some mental toughness, some toughness to play on the road as much as we have. Purdue is one of the better environments in the country. I think that’s going to go a long ways for these road games because the SEC is looking really good. We have some big rival games on the road that we’re going to play really well in hostile environments. I think this helped.”

Oats on Derrion Reid’s play from a two-way perspective…

“He’s getting more comfortable. The thing with Derrion is he missed so much in the summer. At first, he was with USA Basketball, so he missed the beginning. Then he got injured a couple different times and missed reps. So he’s getting more comfortable. He’s figuring out what we want out of him. He had two O boards tonight. Shoot, there was a day in practice between Carolina and this game where he was the best offensive rebounder on the team. Shoot, one of the best offensive rebounders in the country. If we can get that energy and that effort and those kind of intangible plays, if you will, he can be a great defender. He can be a great rebounder, a great slasher. He’s a good shooter when he takes the right shots. There’s a lot of stuff he does and kind of fill the stat sheet. So just going to keep bringing him along. I thought he was pretty good. I’m looking at his offensive leverage – we were actually better with him in the game offensively. So he made some stuff happen tonight.”

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