When you do the Nate Oats self-evaluation, where do you want to improve the most as a head coach that will translate to more wins?

Holding guys accountable on the defensive end of the floor. I didn’t do a good job of that. That’s why we weren’t good on defense. That’s the bottom line.

Schematically, personnel-wise, all that, is a big deal. I’m going to study it and I have been studying it, and we’re going to get good. But at the end of the day, whatever you hold them accountable for is what they’re going to be good at, and I didn’t do a great job of that.

So how do you figure out, in this weird summer, what you have? Or do you think you have a good idea of how everything fits together?

I don’t think we’re going to have a good answer on that until we start practicing with them. In my mind, I’ve got a great idea of how I think they should fit together. In my mind, how the pieces fit together last year was a lot better than what they actually did.

I think we’re going to be a lot deeper this year, to where we can withstand some injuries. A kid like (freshman) Keon Ambrose. Is he going to be strictly a four? Can he play some three? Is he going to be able to play some five? How physical is he? I don’t know any of that. Alex Reese had hip surgery. How is he going to recover? Is he going to be strictly a five? Can we get him to move a lot better to where we can play him at the four? Bruner can play like a four-man. Are Bruner and Alex Reese going to be able to play a lot together? Or is it one or the other? Is Herb Jones going to be a three or do we play him strictly as a four? A lot of those questions, I got a pretty good idea in my mind, but until we get out there practicing and start putting the pieces together and see how guys play together, it’s impossible to predict.

What constitutes success in Year 2?

That’s a really good question, because what if we don’t have a full season? It’s really easy to put a number of wins on something — if we hit X amount of wins it’ll be a successful year. I always hesitate to do that. Even at Buffalo my last year, we had 32 wins. But I never wanted to say Sweet 16 or bust. We didn’t make the Sweet 16 my last year at Buffalo, but I thought that was as successful a year as Buffalo basketball had, ever. Thirty-two wins was ridiculous. We ran into Texas Tech, who probably should’ve won the national championship that year.

When you measure success, you have to look at what you can control, and did you do a great job at everything you can control? Are we much improved on defense? Are we in the top 25 percent, top third of the SEC on defense? If we are, then we made the jump we wanted to. In one- or two-possession games, we were 4-7. Can we close games better? I thought we closed a lot of games terrible. We were up 20 on Florida and lost in double-overtime. You can’t do that. Can we do a better job preparing them to win close games? Those are some of the things that, if we’re doing them better, we were successful at improving.

I’ve never put a number of wins on a goal sheet in front of a team. It’s more, let’s make sure we’re getting better every day, let’s analyze the biggest weaknesses we have, let’s talk about them, let’s figure out how to get better at them. We looked at our weaknesses this year at Alabama and we’re all-in on improving them. If we improve on those, and continue to get better at what our strengths are, then we’ve had a successful year.