Alabama went to the Final Four with abysmal defensive numbers -- and Nate Oats believes Kentucky can too

If you think Kentucky is terrible defensively, Nate Oats wants you to know his Alabama team was even worse last year, a group that somehow scored 81 points in a game on seven separate occasions and still lost. The Crimson Tide entered the postseason ranked No. 112 nationally in defensive efficiency, riding that No. 2 offense all the way to the program’s first-ever Final Four.

Oats called Nick Saban asking for advice before that run, the legendary head coach telling him to put everything that had happened up to that point in the rearview mirror and focus on what’s ahead.

“He kind of gave me the ‘next’ idea — next, next, next. So guys bought in,” he said at the time. “We can make this run. Other teams have done it. We have the capability to do it. We’ve got to get back to playing great defense — or start playing great defense.”

Like that Alabama team, Kentucky also has the No. 2 offense in college basketball, scoring a million points a game with a balanced attack. Also like that Alabama team, Kentucky is grading out terribly on the other end, ranked No. 86 nationally — the SEC’s best conference-only offense and the SEC’s worst conference-only defense.

Any advice Oats can give Mark Pope as the first-year Kentucky coach looks to take the Wildcats to the Final Four?

“Listen, I’m sure he’s going to try to get them to be a little better than we were last year because we weren’t very good. I think we weren’t even in the top 100 there to close the year out,” Oats said following Alabama’s win over Kentucky on Saturday. “I’ll just say this: if your offense is good enough, you can get yourself enough wins. And again, I think they’ve got the personnel to be a pretty good defensive team.

“I mean, you kind of go down this list, like (Amari) Williams can protect the rim. (Otega) Oweh is tough, physical. (Lamont) Butler is one of the best perimeter defenders I’ve seen in college basketball. I think (Andrew) Carr’s tough, smart. They’ve got enough guys here that can really guard that I think they’ll get better.”

The Kentucky defense had moments of brilliance, but the Alabama offense just had a few more moments of their own on the other end.

“I think they showed it at times tonight. Our offense was clicking tonight, but they had some good stops on us. There just wasn’t much of an answer,” he said. “The offense looks good. We’re not turning it over. They’re forcing us into some tough shots. We’ve got to get some more (offensive) boards. They did a good job on the defensive glass. We had 24 (offensive) boards against A&M a week ago. We ended up with 15 today, but it’s not 24. And we had way fewer turnovers, so we had more shots.”

As bad as they were defensively entering the postseason, the Tide threw those numbers and analytics in the trash and hit reset going into March Madness. If they could put together a solid effort on the defensive end, the offense would do the heavy lifting on the other end. There was a genuine belief those two things together would be enough to send Alabama to the Final Four.

And that’s exactly how things unfolded.

“I’ll say this: we just kept believing last year all the way to the end. We’re gonna get it fixed,” Oats said. “We lost in the SEC Tournament, and then we came back and I tried to give them – I talked to both Frank Martin and Coach (Jim) Boeheim, who had kind of had teams that maybe struggled at the end of the year and still made a Final Four run on that Sunday, Selection Sunday. We met on Monday. I said, ‘Listen, we’re throwing out the regular season. I don’t care about the last two weeks. Let’s try to be the best defensive team in the country for the next three weeks, and let’s see what we can do with it.’

“If you go look at our defensive efficiency for those five NCAA Tournament games we played, it was a lot better than it was during the regular season.”

Oats doesn’t want that to happen for Kentucky, necessarily — especially with one more head-to-head matchup coming in Tuscaloosa a month from now. He wants that return trip to the national semifinal with his team firing on all cylinders at the right time, not a competitor in the SEC.

But they can do it.

“Hopefully for us, when we play Kentucky, they wait until March to get the defense figured, at least for the one game at our place. But it is possible to get the defense — because we got ours going late,” Oats said. “It’s better late than never, but it’d be nice to have a solid defense for the rest of January, February, March, maybe into April and see what happens.”

Alabama has the blueprint for what Kentucky is trying to accomplish this time around.