Oats prepares for better finish for Bama basketball next season

Despite the possible loss of John Petty and Kira Lewis, Jr., Alabama coach Nate Oats is confident his second year will be an improvement over the 2019-20 season. (Courtesy Unv. Alabama Media Relations)

By TIM GAYLE

For many of the men’s basketball teams in the Southeastern Conference, the 2019-20 season played out with predictable finishes. 

LSU, Kentucky and Auburn were among the best in the conference, while Vanderbilt struggled through its transition with a new head coach and Missouri is still putting the pieces back together in its program.

Alabama, meanwhile, was picked to finish sixth in the standings in preseason balloting and flirted briefly with championship dreams as it rose as high as third in the standings in late January before crashing back to reality with its typical late-season swoon.

First-year Crimson Tide coach Nate Oats, speaking out on the 2019-20 season for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic canceled the SEC Tournament, was clearly not pleased at a team that faltered in February and March and finished with a losing record in the last two months for the fourth consecutive year.

“It obviously didn’t end well,” Oats said. “All the teams I’ve coached in the past have been playing their best basketball come March. Obviously, that last week of the regular season we were not playing our best basketball.

“I’m not happy with where we are. They didn’t bring us in here to go 16-15, we had that discussion with some players after the year. But at the same time, you’ve got to look at some of the positives. I think people understand when we came in, we said we were going to play a certain way … and we played that way, even with a roster that didn’t necessarily fit, wasn’t recruited to play that way, that’s still how we were going to play and I thought we did a pretty good job of it with what we had.” 

On the positive side, Alabama led the conference in points per game (82) and 3-point percentage (34.9) and was third in assists and rebounds. That had Alabama tied with Auburn for third place in the league in late January with a 12-8 record, roughly the same record the Crimson Tide posted in 11 of the last 13 seasons through that span.

On the negative side, the Tide went 4-5 in February (the program has only posted a winning record in that month once in the last seven years) and 0-2 in March, extending its losing streak in regular-season losses in that month to seven. The last time the Tide posted a winning record in March regular-season games was 2014 and the last time it finished the month – counting regular season and postseason games -- with a winning record was 2011.

This year’s squad finished like others in recent memory. An Alabama squad that ranked first in the conference in defensive rebounding in mid-January was last in that category at the end of the season. Alabama was also 14th (out of 14 teams) in scoring defense.

“Defensively we were not as good as we need to be,” Oats admitted. “We’ve got to do a better job as coaches. We met on that (on Monday), doing a deep dive on some of the better defensive teams in college basketball. We’ve got to get better on defense, some of that’s with recruiting, some of that’s with players staying healthy.”

Oats’ first season with the Tide started on an ominous note as two players were sidelined with season-ending injuries, a third was never cleared by the NCAA in his transfer from Villanova and two more were sidelined during the season with injuries.  

“I don’t want to use injuries necessarily as an excuse but it is a reality,” Oats said. “I think Coach (Nick) Saban is one of the best coaches in the history of team sports and they had injuries from Tua (Tagovailoa) down to the linebackers at the beginning (of the season). This is the first time they hadn’t played in the College Football Playoff and to say injuries had nothing to do with it would be absurd. They obviously had something to do with it.

“We just didn’t have enough depth with the perimeter players to withstand some injuries that we had. Talking about big wings, Tevin (Mack) leaves us, Juwan (Gary) has an ACL, (James) Rojas has an ACL, we’re left with one. Herb (Jones) gets hurt, really played injured most of the year. The little stretch that he was not injured, he led the SEC in turnover-assist ratio, then he breaks his wrist. Then when (John) Petty went out, he was the only big guard that was playing well for us. So we’ve got to do a better job getting our roster to look a lot more like what we want it to look like, with more big guards, with more guys that are skilled with some size on the perimeter to play.”

Oats referred to his 2018 Buffalo that went 27-9 before losing to Kentucky in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. That team featured two guards who could direct the offense, a third who could shoot and led the team in scoring, a 6-foot-7 wing and a 6-10 forward. While Alabama’s 2020 offense resembled Oats’ 2018 squad, the 2021 team will look a little more like the team he wants, even if it only has the three players who sat out this season. 

“What ideally this roster looks like is multiple skilled players all over the floor,” he said. “That’s how we won in the past. We’d like to get more guards and big guards that can play, more guys that can pass, dribble and shoot all over the floor, we want more ‘bigs’ that can shoot. So we’re looking at every possible angle there is. We’re talking to high school kids that we’ve been tracking for a while, we’re talking to juco kids we’ve been tracking for a while, we’re talking to transfers that have just become available here in the last week or two. We don’t know how this is going to wind up looking (with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic). But we are working the phones hard, me and all three assistants, and we’re trying to get this roster to look a lot more like what we need it to look like to play the way we want to play.”      

Oats said both Kira Lewis and John Petty have entered their name in the upcoming NBA Draft, although neither has signed with an agent and could return to the team if they withdraw their name from the draft before the deadline.

“They’re both going to put their name into the draft, they’re going to go to the workouts,” Oats said. “They both needed to have some good workouts to get themselves where they wanted to be, we just don’t know when those are going to be. We’re recruiting as if they’re not going to be here. If they happen to come back, then we’ll address that situation when that happens.”

If Oats decides to recruit as if Lewis and Petty are early entries in the NBA, James Bolden has graduated and Raymond Hawkins has entered the transfer portal, Alabama has four positions to fill on next season’s roster. One of those belongs to Keon Ambrose-Hylton, the highly touted forward who signed in November. He hopes to add IMA Academy’s Darius Miles to that list as well. 

The return of Jones along with the addition of the three players who sat out 2020 (Gary, Rojas and Villanova transfer Jahvon Quinerly) will ease the departure of Lewis and Petty. 

“Some days, he was the best player in practice,” Oats said of Quinerly. “I think having Quinerly there definitely helped Kira’s development and I definitely think Quinerly got much better going against Kira every day. So it starts with those three. It doesn’t really need to change, but then we’re going to add some guys in. The question is, now who’s leaving, who’s coming?

“I told our guys that if any of you aren’t comfortable in this -- some of you weren’t recruited to play this type of style -- we will 100 percent help you get to a better spot if that’s what you want. Now, at this point, none of them have made that decision. As we start to get some commits, we will have those conversations and they may be a little harder conversations as they see different guys committed to us. They may realize that their playing time is going to go down. We’ll have those conversations coming up, but I don’t know who they’ll be (with).”