What head coach Nate Oats said about No. 14 Alabama's rematch with No. 4 Tennessee

Everything Alabama head coach Nate Oats said Friday while meeting with reporters to preview No. 14 Alabama (20-8, 12-3 SEC) hosting No. 4 Tennessee (21-6, 12-3) for Saturday night’s game (8 Eastern Time, ESPN) between the SEC’s two first-place teams at Coleman Coliseum:

Opening Statement 

“Excited for the game Saturday, obviously it’s a big game. First time in program history that College GameDay is here for Alabama basketball. So the program has come a ways, that (ESPN) wants to come here for the game. And it’s obviously not the SEC championship, but it’s going to go a long ways in determining who the SEC champion is in the regular season. So expect to have great crowd, expect to have a great crowd for College GameDay. Crowd has been amazing this year and should be a great environment. But I will say this, we want to make sure that we’re being respectful and considerate of our language and signs and everything for College GameDay and during the game. It’s going to be a fun Saturday morning, fun Saturday night. We can have a ton of fun. Let’s just try to remind the fans, be mindful of our language during both events, the College GameDay and the game at night, just to represent University of Alabama and the state of Alabama like it should be represented. 

“But to get to the game, Tennessee, tied with them in first place. They’re one of the best, the highest-rated team in our league right now. They handled us pretty well at their place, so we’re fortunate to be tied with them for first place with the way that they beat us at their place. So we’ve got to do things significantly better than the first time we played them. Number one being our turnovers. We’re going to have to handle their physicality a lot better, take care of the ball a lot better. And obviously our defense has been a little bit of an issue all year. It’s going to have to be great. Dalton Knecht, leading scorer in the league. Only player, I believe, in Division I this year that has scored 35 more points four times, which, shoot, he’s scoring the ball at high level. I think it’s the first time since 2019-2020 that anybody in Power 6 basketball has scored 35 points or more four times in a year. His last game out, kind of singlehandedly took the game over, second part of the second half against Auburn and willed them to the win after Auburn had them down. So we got to be aware of him. 

“But they’ve got a really good team. (Zakai) Zeigler leads the lead in assists, so (if) you put too much attention on Knecht and you open the floor up for Zeigler. (Jonas) Aidoo has been very good inside. Again, you pay too much attention to Knecht and all of a sudden Aidoo starts hurting you. So it’s not like this is a one-man band. (Santiago) Vescovi has been one of the best guards in this league for a long time. 

“They just took a very good team, one of the best teams in the league, added the leading score in the league to it in Knecht. And now they’ve got a team that’s primed to get a No. 1 or No. 2 seed (in the NCAA Tournament). And I’m sure anything short of a Final Four run, they’d be disappointed with the end of the year. So it’s a really good team we got coming in here with the SEC league title on the line.” 

If there’s an update on Alabama’s Lattrell Wrightsell (concussion)

“He’s going through workouts. It’s really day-to-day based on meetings with Clarke )Holter), our trainer, Dr. Pitner, a doctor and neurologist. And I say he’s doing really well, he’s getting much better. But it’s not something a coach can (say) when he can play. They’re going let me know to comply. So I don’t have an answer yet on that, but hopefully it’s here pretty quick.”

How this Tennessee team has improved since Alabama played in Knoxville in January

“Knecht has had some really big games since then. I think they’re playing pretty fast. Good in transition. They’re a team that’s always been great defensively under Coach Barnes. And offensively they’ve gotten really good. Their last 11 wins they’ve scored 80-plus points in nine of them. You go back to last year, the last 11 wins last year,  they scored 80 or more in one of them. So a team whose offense has gotten extremely good to go with an elite level defense. And now that’s why teams are probably rightfully so talking about a Final Four run for this team. Because they’re that good on both sides of the ball.”

If the 91-71 loss at Tennessee was a product of Alabama’s defense not being good enough or if there was more to it

“Defense was probably our No. 1 problem. Our turnovers on offense were probably equally as big of a problem. And when you turn the ball over 22 times and you’re feeding their transition offense, and your defense isn’t that good to begin with, you have a real problem. Because you’re not going against your set defense enough because you’re turning it over. Your set defense isn’t good enough when they are going against it, and then when your defense isn’t good enough, you’re not getting out in transition so you’re not getting easy buckets and it just becomes cyclical. You don’t get stops. You’re always taking it out of the net. They have their defense set. They’re super physical, they’re in you, they’re turning you over, they’re getting easy buckets, now we’re going against the set defense all night. They’re going and it just got very cyclical in a downward fashion and it wasn’t good.

“We’ve got to take care of the ball. We’ve got to get our defense set. We need more stops. If we get stops, to get out in transition and we’re going against them when they’re defense is set, a lot that is off. So it’s a combination of a lot, but the turnovers and just the defensive focus, intensity, physicality, it wasn’t there the first time.” 

Tennessee’s Jonas Aidoo playing well in the first game against Alabama and Alabama’s front court defense struggling

“We talked a little bit more about what we’re going to have to do. (Nick) Pringle, I think, has been really good here lately. I think he’s going to be a little more primed and ready for the game. I think some of our younger kids have grown up a little more. And I’ve told our freshmen, it’s March now, we don’t need you to be acting like freshman year. You look a lot more like sophomores. You play a whole season of basketball and gotten a lot of reps. So hopefully Jalin (Stevenson), (Mouhamed) Dioubate will be a lot better for us. But the front court guys just got to be a little tougher. They got ducked in all night. And Aidoo is big and he’s good but we got to make it a little harder. And our guards got to do a little better not letting the guards get so deep, making it easy to just drop the ball like they did last time, either. But yeah, we talked about possible traps. We’ve trapped from the baseline, from the top. We’ve done it different ways this year and we played some of the best big men in the country back in the non-conference. We went three straight games where we had (Zac) Edey and (Ryan) Kalkbrenner and then (Oumar) Ballo from Arizona. So we’ve worked on some traps and we’ve revisited some of that stuff we’ve done back then.”