re: Tide Hoops | Recruiting

Yep. When a game goes to overtime, key stat in the loss, 11/23 regulation from the charity stripe, so we beat ourselves.
Congrats to UCLA for seizing the moment, moving on to the Final 4.
Despite our poor performance last Sunday night, proud of our guys for all they accomplished this season.

Bryan Hodgson @BamacoachBryan

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Final grades for every SEC men’s basketball team

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Alabama: A

In Nate Oats’ second year, the Crimson Tide took a huge leap forward. SEC regular-season champs? Check. SEC Tournament champs? Check. First Sweet 16 appearance since 2004? Check.

Yeah, the season came to an unsatisfying end, losing to UCLA in overtime on Sunday night, but only 1 team each year gets to end its season truly happy. The loss doesn’t overshadow anything the Tide accomplished this year.

And Oats figures to have plenty of talent back next year. Guys like Herb Jones and John Petty Jr. will probably head to the NBA. Alex Reese and Jordan Bruner might move on to the pro ranks, too.

But Jahvon Quinerly, Jaden Shackelford, Josh Primo and Keon Ellis could all come back to form a solid core for the Tide. And 5-star freshman JD Davison will be a big part of next year’s team.

It was a special year in Tuscaloosa, but with the way Oats is coaching, SEC titles and deep March Madness runs could become the norm.

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Saturday Down South

And how many of you would be bitching if Oats took the ball out of the hands of the SEC POY and went with Q and he blew it? Quinerly was great most of the game, but he was a one trick pony in that game: drive and finish. When they caught on and had the big man clog the middle, it stopped working and we had no real reliable alternative. And Q does have the tendency to get out of control at times. Imagine if the game was on the line and he went on one of his out of control, hell bent for leather drives and turned it over. Some of you would have lost your minds. Nate danced with who brought him, and it didn't work.

I'm not questioning Oats decisions, we had no good options that night. Nothing was working consistently, and whatever did work briefly, Cronin adjusted to and UCLA shut it down. Our 3 point shooters went ice cold and got scared to shoot. Shack shut it down, Primo didn't get many minutes, Petty was a bricklayer as was Herb.

Maybe I'm not giving UCLA enough credit, seeing as how they totally fricked up Michigan's offense even worse than ours, but damn, nothing was working, nothing was falling. And Gary fouling out really hurt. I think he could have been an option inside late and in OT.

frick UCLA, they play basketball like Auburn plays football; weird shite happens and voodoo comes into play and everything you did well all year stops working. We couldn't even get defensive stops except for that brief period to start the 2nd half. And again, Cronin adjusted and it stopped working. It still pisses me off, but not quite as bad after I saw where they just handcuffed Michigan. If we played the Wolverines instead, I guarantee you it would not have been a 51-49 game, more like 81-79.

Gonzaga looks like Bama football this year: on a mission and unstoppable. Baylor may give them a game, but Gonzaga pulls away in the end. I'd take Gonzaga vs the field easily at this point. They are your eventual undefeated national champions, mark it down.

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Great teams don't shoot free throws like this Bama team did all year (for the most part). It caught up with them.

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We weren't a bad free throw shooting team this year, though. We were a better FT shooting team than Baylor and pretty close to equal with UCLA. Our last 8 games of the year before UCLA we shot 73%. Our 2 worst games with 10+ attempts we shot 57% and 65%. Against UCLA we shot 44%.

Just had by far our worst night of the season on the biggest stage

We are a better free throw shooting team than Baylor, who should make the Championship, but we sure did pick a bad night to crap the bed on free throws.

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Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats has proclaimed a “culture change” for the Crimson Tide program, a sweeping phrase that means different things to different people.

Oats’ perspective for that comment could be broad and expansive. Better than anyone else, he is positioned to judge the response from recruits across the nation, whether highly-ranked by the recruiting services or evaluated by the staff according to Alabama’s particular needs. The two do not have to be mutually exclusive, of course.

Oats is also uniquely suited to evaluate the younger players on the roster. That includes talent but also work ethic, coachability and what the old school likes to refer to as “locker room presence.”

That’s part of “culture change,” probably a more important part of Oats’ analysis than people realize. But let’s try to put a more precise definition to the concept.

1) Fan Interest. There has always been a strong core group of Alabama basketball fans, moreso than the national media realizes.

Does that mean Alabama fans always fill up Coleman Coliseum, the Taj Majal of Quonset Huts, for a Tuesday night game when the team is 8-9? No. Would this year’s games have been tough tickets except for the coronavirus? Definitely.

2) Postseason Consistency. This is tougher than you think.

Look around this year’s NCAA Tournament field. Do you see Duke? Kentucky? Louisville? Indiana?

Bad years happen, although an almost immediate answer when fans are asked about what reasonable expectations are, “make the NCAA Tournament every year” is the answer. A culture change would mean being competitive for a berth every year, without droughts that last six or seven years.

3) Winning Despite Personnel Changes. Players are going to graduate. Some are going to leave for the pros, others for more conducive situations they hope to find at the other end of the transfer portal.

A likely guess is that the transfer portal will be a zero-sum proposition for Alabama in the offseason.

So what will Alabama basketball 2022 look like?

The Crimson Tide had solid talent in 2021. It wasn’t Gonzaga/Michigan level talent, but the roster was deep. Herbert Jones, John Petty Jr. and a much-improved Alex Reese won’t be easily replaced.

Could someone else on the roster test the NBA waters? It wouldn’t be surprising in this era of the “no agent, no harm, no foul” NBA evaluation, it might be smart for Jahvon Quinerly or Josh Primo to get feedback, even if the evaluations are that another year of college would help.

Quinerly, via his Twitter, seems strongly leaning to return.

Nothing is certain in life, but I’d feel confident about this: with Quinerly and incoming McDonald’s All-America J.D. Davison, it will take a stout defense to keep Alabama from getting up the floor and to the rim.

The other key pieces with experience on the perimeter will be Primo, Jaden Shackelford and Keon Ellis, all solid. Juwan Gary developed into an inside beast in 2021, but, as the UCLA game illustrated, even a beast can be undersized. Alex Tchikou, the 6-foot-11 medical redshirt, might help. Paired with another 7-footer in late recruiting, that might help more.

James Rojas, Keon Ambrose-Hylton and Darius Miles all have the potential to make a season-to-season jump like Gary’s.

The culture change Oats spoke about seems real. The 2021-22 season will be an interesting lab experiment in its growth rate.

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LINK

I never made the connection until I read that and thought OMG, he's right! Coleman is a giant Quonset hut!!