Nate Oats details what Alabama needs to correct in rematch against Auburn

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Things didn’t go so well for Alabama the first time in matched up against Auburn.

Back on Feb. 15 these two teams met in a highly-anticipated No. 1 vs. No. 2 showdown in Coleman Coliseum. The Tigers got the better of the Tide, winning 94-85.

Now, the two are set for a rematch to close out the regular season, this time in Neville Arena. Ahead of the game, Alabama head coach Nate Oats outlined some things the Crimson Tide needs to do differently in order to avoid a sweep at the hands of their archrival, starting with the offense.

“We didn’t get out in transition enough. We didn’t get enough quality shots. Our offensive side, we’ve got to try to run a little better,” Oats said.

Alabama is a team that thrives off of getting out in transition and playing an up-tempo style of basketball. The Tide ranks first in the country in pace, which is a huge reason why it also ranks first nationally in raw points per game, scoring over 91 per contest.

There were minimal transition opportunities in this game, and it limited Alabama’s ability to play its preferred style of offensive basketball. Alabama also prefers to shoot a high volume of 3-pointers, and that area of its game was limited as well. It only got 26 threes off for the game, and even worse, made just five of them. That type of shooting performance isn’t going to cut it against the No. 1 team in the sport.

“And then we’ve got to be able to get our shooters open,” Oats said. “They’re running us off the line, so can we set better screens, can we get them free a little bit better in transition?”

Oats went into much more detail about the defensive effort in the first game, which needs to be vastly improved. Looking at the point total makes it obvious enough, it’s hard to win a game in which the opponent scores 94 points. Even worse than that, Auburn made 40 percent of its 30 3-point looks for the game, many of which were very high-quality shots.

“I think defensively, we didn’t do a great job running them off the line,” Oats said. “I think a couple guys, (Johni) Broome has hit two threes in his last five games, six games, and he hit two against us. (Chaney) Johnson had a couple threes. You know, do we make an earlier adjustment on some of that stuff? Some of it’s the gameplan the coaches put together and it didn’t go as well as we hoped, some of it’s our guys got to have a better effort.

“We’ve got to guard their shooters, and even their guys that are capable of making shots even if you don’t label them as shooters. (Tahaad) Pettiford, (Chad) Baker-Mazara, (Miles) Kelly, (Denver) Jones, all those guys. Then even if they’re not, we can’t let the other guys capable of making shots just have free range of open shots either. Guarding the 3-point line, defensive rebounding would help in transition, we need to get defensive rebounds and get out in transition.”

There were a few positives that Oats took away from the first meeting, notably Alabama’s ability to take care of the ball. The Tide turned it over just seven times, one of its lower turnover totals of the season. Oats emphasized that those little things will be of great importance playing a team as good as Auburn is this season.

“They’re good. We can play a really good basketball game and still lose to them,” Oats said. “We’re gonna have to do all the little things well. We’re gonna have to make free throws, we didn’t turn it over much the first game. We’re gonna have to take care of the ball again. We can’t let some stuff that we did well the first game all of a sudden go to the wayside emphasizing some other stuff too.”

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