re: Alabama Basketball Megathread | 26-7 (16-2)

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Almost nobody plays like Alabama. Nate Oats thinks mid-range shots are poison. A modern NBA approach to college hoops. This has produced one of the best Alabama seasons in history—and we’ll probably look up in five years and see copycats across the sport.

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My thanks to @Kyle__Boone for teaming up with me on this story. Oats was unfiltered, as always. This rant (just a snippet of a longer one that hit the cutting room floor) in particular stood out.

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The upgrade on D (from sub-100 top top-three in a year's time) is as notable and interesting as any of the NBA-ization of Alabama this year. Even more, @HDIntelligence is an independent scouting/data service that Alabama has been using, and it's obviously paying huge dividends.

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LINK

NBA approach? Let's hope he doesn't get any ideas about jumping into that any time soon.

He needs to stay as long as possible.

Absolutely fascinating stuff. I didn't know that their analytics company was Dover/Houston. I knew those guys started something but I didn't realize it was full service analytics - I thought it was scheduling stuff.

I remember Oats noting stats they got from "their analytics guys" in a post game presser and was curious who that was referencing.

Interesting.

In regards to HDI, Colton Houston seems like a really good dude. Hope he does well with this.

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Wonder why he rewards longer-range threes?

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Main reason would be teaching the players - and them seeing it in real time while playing - how valuable spacing on the floor is.

Great article, but is Oats giving away too much instead of making the competition have to figure it out for themselves? They eventually would, but I think he is speeding up the process.

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What I didn't know is that they churn out data that detailed that quickly. Very cool that Oats won't start his post game press conference until he gets the data back from them and that it happens in 10 minutes or less.

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Yep - like I said above, I remember seeing him look over his printout and noting something like "our PPP defense with this group on the floor was 0.69" and thinking holy shite, how on earth do they already have that info?

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Great article, but is Oats giving away too much instead of making the competition have to figure it out for themselves? They eventually would, but I think he is speeding up the process.

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Doubtful. If someone who doesn't fully embrace the mentality tries to replicate it they'll probably fail spectacularly. Coaches who truly believe in a pure rim & 3, up tempo attack aren't going to learn a whole lot that they don't already know.

Good article today in the Wall Street Journal:

Alabama Is Romping Through the SEC—in Basketball, This Time

The University of Alabama is home to a dominant team that spent the better part of its season crushing opponents with a combination of ruthlessly efficient scoring and lockdown defense. It has steamrolled most of the Southeastern Conference as it moved up the rankings.

And unlike legendary coach Nick Saban’s football team, it plays on the hardwood.

Alabama men’s basketball team has reached unprecedented heights in 2020-21, the second year of coach Nate Oats’s tenure. It clinched the program’s first regular season SEC title in 19 years with a win over Mississippi State on Saturday. The 19-6 Crimson Tide have climbed as high as sixth in the Associated Press Top 25 Poll. And much like their university’s football team, they are poised to make a deep run in the postseason.

This pandemic basketball season has gone in fits and starts, with several of the top-ranked teams sitting dormant for weeks at a time following coronavirus outbreaks. Alabama and its fast, 3-point-gunning offense has been a point of consistency. It’s one of the reasons why the Crimson Tide are projected to earn a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

Alabama is not exactly revolutionizing college basketball the way the Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors did in the National Basketball Association, when the pros realized that three is greater than two and began exploiting that simple mathematical truth to usher in the league’s long-ball revolution.

Plenty of college teams have had success in March by tossing up an abundance of threes: Michigan made a surprise run to the championship in 2013 when Nik Stauskas forgot how to miss from deep. Villanova won championships in 2016 and 2018 with an offense dedicated to creating space for 3-point shots or drives to the rim.

Plenty more teams have not been as lucky with the same strategies, however, mainly because most college rosters don’t have sharp shooters like Steph Curry or Klay Thompson on their roster.

There’s no single sniper on Alabama’s roster, but the Crimson Tide benefit from having a bevy of strong, if not spectacular, shooters. Senior John Petty Jr. is the only Crimson Tide player ranked in the top 100 nationally for 3-point field goal percentage among players with at least 2.5 attempts per game, according to the NCAA. He’s made 38.1% of his 155 attempts from the field; the rest of his teammates with more than 40 attempts this season average 35.9% shooting. In any given game about 40% of Alabama’s offense is from 3-pointers, the highest percentage among ranked teams.

Alabama’s offense still churns when the shooters get cold because they play so fast and get so many looks. According to KenPom.com, the Crimson Tide play at the seventh fastest tempo in Division I. That helps explain why Alabama’s 10.7 made 3-pointers per game is fourth in the country despite their shooting percentage from deep coming in at 90th.

The genius of Oats’s offense is also its geometry. To get shooters open around the perimeter, it puts a premium on making space. If no one is open beyond the arc, chances are another teammate has a free lane to drive to the basket for an easy two.

It has made Alabama a prolific scorer. The Tide has twice broken the century mark in conference games, scoring 105 against Louisiana State in 79 possessions on Jan. 19 and hanging 115 on Georgia in 82 on Feb. 13.

“Their efficiency numbers are very good. But they’re also a good defensive team,” said college basketball analyst Jay Bilas in an interview. “That’s the difference in them from this year to last year is they play at that pace and they still value their defensive possessions.”

According to KenPom.com, Alabama’s defense is one of the most lethally efficient in the country. Alabama’s defense allows its opponents the third lowest points per 100 possessions in Division I, behind only Memphis and Loyola Chicago. Six of the team’s in the SEC have had their worst shooting nights of the season against Alabama.
If Alabama has a weakness it would be a tendency to get in foul trouble. In last week’s 81-66 road loss to No. 20 Arkansas, Alabama drew just 18 fouls but committed 32. By the end of the game, Arkansas had scored 27 points on free throws.

“We have to defend without fouling,” said Oats after the loss. “We can’t put them on the line 43 times and expect to win a game.”

His team will have one more shot to tighten things up, against Auburn on Tuesday, before the SEC Tournament begins on March 10. Whether or not Oats and Alabama replicate their regular season feat, 2020-21 is the first time Alabama football and men’s basketball have finished atop the league since 1975.

Oats might not own a single national championship ring to Saban’s seven. But there is one other tidbit that these Crimson Tide teams have in common: neither was able to defeat Clemson in their last meeting.

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Now, you have to have a group of guys with the competitive character to be disgusted with losing scrimmages/games like that to really create the environment for it to drive behavior - but if you have that, I mean it's perfect.

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I have always believed that competitiveness is a learned trait. Some people come by it more naturally or have a greater capacity for it than others(think Jordan), but no one lacks it entirely. It's just a question of figuring out how to bring it out of some guys and then maximize it. Saban is a master at accomplishing that, and it's a big reason he is tGOAT. If Oats is even half as good at training players to be hypercompetitive as Saban is he's going to cut down a lot of nets in his career.