Everything Nate Oats said after Alabama's 87-78 loss at Purdue

No. 2 Alabama basketball lost on the road at No. 13 Purdue, 87-78, on Friday night inside the Mackey Center in West Lafayette, Indiana. Following the Crimson Tide’s first defeat of the year, Alabama head coach Nate Oats spoke to reporters. Below is everything Oats said.

Oats’ opening statement…

“We schedule these games for a reason, where we’d like to go against the best teams in the country and figure out what we got work on. We’ve got plenty to work on after this game. Braden Smith’s one of the best guards in the country. They don’t turn the ball over. They had three turnovers as a team. We got beat up in the post a little bit more than I thought we were going to. Getting Cliff, I didn’t think we were gonna need to double as much, and Kaufman-Renn obviously wasn’t their primary post-up guy, playing with Edey for the last, pretty much his whole career here. So he didn’t post up as much, and I didn’t know he was that good. He kind of killed us in there. It wasn’t just Cliff, it was everybody that guarded him. 

“The coaching staff’s got to do a better job prepping for post-ups like that. We got to do a better job getting our shooters open. We didn’t do a great job getting our shooters open, and then shoot, you got to give them a lot of credit, though. I mean, those guards are good. They’re super skilled. Smith, Loyer, they don’t turn the ball too much. They don’t miss many open shots. Braden goes 0-for-4 for three and still ends up with 17, 10 and six and only one turnover. So I didn’t think we did a great job on some of the stuff, and we still had a 6-point lead with 10 minutes to go and they just kind of walked up down after we got up six. 

“So they’re good. We’ve got some work to do. We’ll get back to the drawing board and get better. We have a big one coming up against Illinois on Wednesday.”

Oats on where he is looking to improve moving forward…

“Obviously, defensively, we got to do a better job in the post. We got to do a better job keeping teams off the offensive boards. I thought Purdue did a pretty good job on the O boards with us. We’ve got to do a better job finding better shots for our shooters. And those are the biggest things. We’ve got to do a little bit better job closing games, too, like with some effort. I thought we’d be able to wear them down a little bit more than we did, and I thought they closed the game better than we did after we got up six. Some of that’s maybe we got to keep some guys a little more fresh in there. We got to find some different lineups. 

“But we’ve got some younger freshmen who are figuring out. Labaron looked pretty good tonight. We got to figure out ways to get some of these other guys, some new guys, in the rotation maybe a little bit more and stay a little more fresh as we work through the game trying to keep our pace up.”

Oats on what went wrong during Purdue’s 13-0 run in the second half…

“We got to do a better job guarding some of their actions. I mean, they bring the ball up the floor and they get their primary handlers in the actions. We didn’t do a great job. They were able to get downhill on some of that. And then once we got up six, we were able to play in transition a little bit more, and then they got more into a halfcourt game at that point. When we got in a halfcourt, we didn’t execute some stuff like we needed to and we didn’t do a good job in halfcourt. I’m gonna have to go back and look at that run. I wasn’t aware. Obviously. I knew we got up and then they made a run. I didn’t know. I’ll have to look at that a little bit more on tape.”

Oats on playing at Mackey Arena…

“I love the environment. I mean, they got a big-time environment here. It’s my first time being here. I grew up in Big Ten country. I’ve been in most of the Big Ten arenas. I hadn’t been here yet. I’m a big basketball fan in general. As a fan, this would have been a great game to go to. As an opposing coach, it makes it a little bit more difficult. I mean, it’s hard to get your play calls out. They don’t hear you very well. When they’re they’re on a run, I mean, it’s loud in there, and when they need to stop, it gets loud. So they’ve done a great job. Coach Painter’s done a great job. 

“Somebody gave me a stat – over teams that have just played in Power Five conferences in the last five years, they got more wins than anybody in the country does. So just one of the premier basketball programs in the country, and they’ve got one of the best home environments of anybody in the country. It’s good for our guys to come in and experience it, and hopefully, we learn a lot from it.”

Oats on what he saw from Purdue freshman CJ Cox during the scouting process…

“We had him now as one of the shooters, but kind of like you said, his reputation coming out of high school as a shooter. They had some guys step up, they got him free, and we didn’t do a great job guarding him. And that was big. His 18 minutes were big. You look, they were plus-nine in his 18 minutes. I mean, outside of Kaufman-Reen and Loyer he was the third-best plus-minus on the team. So he played an efficient in 18 minutes, they got him open and he made shots at a high level. We didn’t anticipate him being that good, but we definitely knew he was capable of shooting it. But he went on a little run there.”

Oats on if he was surprised by Purdue’s bench production…

“We knew Colvin could shoot. I thought we did a pretty decent job on him. But Cox kind of picked up the slack there. Heide can shoot. Furst gives them a better-than-decent backup big. I mean, he’s starting a lot of places in the country. So we knew their bench was good. I guess we ended up outscoring six off the bench, but part of that was Labaron had such a good game and he had been starting for us. His 18 helped us. We got to get a little bit better production from some other guys off the bench. And that’s us finding the right role for some of these new guys and figuring it out. But they got a complete team. I mean, they’re good. They don’t have Edey, but they’re very good, and Trey is going to be one of the better forwards in the country, and he showed it tonight.”

Oats on frustration on the defensive end…

“They’ve got skilled guys. I mean, you look at some of the shots they had. I mean, Smith we knew was good. Like I said, he didn’t hit a three and he only got five at the free-throw line, but he had twos. He gets downhill. He gets some pull-ups on us. Loyer got downhill on a few, got fouled. We try to play the numbers, but they kind of defied them a little bit. They had I think on non-rim twos, like almost half their shots were non-rim twos and they shot 45 percent on them. We had them all but 27 on non-rim twos. We needed to do a better job pushing them down to the rim, get some shot-blocking. We didn’t. 

“We need to be better on D. Our defense struggled a little bit last year. I think we’re definitely gonna be better this year than we were last year. We’ve been better so far. This was not one of our better defensive performances. But they got some skilled guys that that really made us pay on a few things, too.”

Oats on Braden Smith, Trey Kaufman-Renn combining to shoot less than 50 percent…

“Some other guys picked it up. Obviously, Cox going 3-of-3 from three, they still made nine threes. We try to take a lot of threes. They had the same amount we did. They just shot a lot better percentage. They were 9-of-16, and we were 9-of-29. They got efficient shooters, good shots. Smith shot 33 percent, but he had 10 assistants, one turnover, seven rebounds and still scored 17 points. So it’s not he had a bad game. We forced him into taking some tough shots, and he hit some tough ones, but he missed some, too. And Kaufman-Renn, I mean, they just kept going to him. I don’t think they anticipated 23 shots from him. We sure didn’t. But he got 26 points on 23 shots. He had a pretty good night himself, too. 

“It’s early in the season. They showed some stuff that we didn’t necessarily expect and we didn’t think we’d have issues with, particularly the post-up stuff, so we got to figure it out. … We got to do a better job prepping our guys for this. But this team, the program’s maybe the best post-up program in the country. They get guys that are good at it. They know how to feed it. They know how to run actions and get in there. They know how to run actions for their shooters when it goes in there. We saw that last year with Edey. We didn’t think we were gonna have to worry as much about it. So we didn’t really plan on having a double post. In hindsight, we probably should have a little bit better answer for Kaufman-Renn than we did. So that’s on us.”

Oats on younger players making plays here and there in their first road game…

“We got to get them guys a little bit more involved maybe so we can get some of our older guys a few less minutes. But they were good. The one three Holloway hit was in our run when we went up. I think Derrion has come along. He was injured a lot. He still hasn’t got the reps in he needs to. I think they’re going to help us. Labaron has been really good. Probably better than what we thought he was going to be. I thought he had pretty good game tonight. But we got to keep developing our bench. We got to keep developing the young guys that they got to help us win a lot of like games this year.”

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