re: UA Basketball (16-15, 8-10)

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“I don’t know if I expected it. It’s what I want, though,” Nate Oats said. “I mean, we want to get up and down and shoot a lot of threes and space the floor, put points up. We want teams to play at our pace. So, it’s great. … Guys are buying in. It’s a lot more fun to play this way. Two years at Buffalo, we were the one team in the country to have four guys average 15 points or more. There’s just more scoring to go around for everybody when you play this way.”

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“We’re still not making the right reads all the time,” Oats said. “We like the floor open, guys driving. When you drive, we’re not trying to get our shot blocked. We’re shooting way too many contested ones at the rim. If they collapse -- and Kentucky’s great at collapsing -- we need to be able to spray the ball out and maybe even take more threes. I’ll never say we took too many threes. As long as they’re good threes, I don’t care how many we take.

“So, if we’re not shooting bad, contested threes, if they’re open, kick-out threes, fire them up every time they’re open. I think we’ve got to get better at making some of those reads off the drives and stuff.”

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Notes and quotes

— Alabama forward Javian Davis was not participating with the team during the media viewing session of practice on Friday. Following the workout, head coach Nate Oats said Davis did take part in half-court drills earlier in the day.

“He’s got a minor hamstring deal. We just kept him out of the full-court stuff… He did everything in the half-court today, so he’ll be good to go for tomorrow.”

— Alabama has scored 90 or more points in five consecutive contests coming into the game at Kentucky, setting a program record for consecutive 90-point games. The Crimson Tide had just one 90-point game last season and only 10 of such games over the past 12 years.

“The expectation is to score as many points as we can, but we know that we’ve got to make a lot of mistakes in the future and make sure we fix them,” point guard Kira Lewis Jr. said. “So just play freely. You know you’re going to make mistakes, and just live with them and get better.”

— Alabama guard John Petty Jr. needs one more 3-pointer to become just the fifth player in program history to make at least 200 treys for his career. Over his past 11 games, the junior is averaging 19.2 points and 4.3 made 3s while shooting 56 percent from deep. Petty had a team-high 18 points and four 3s in Alabama’s 90-69 victory over Mississippi State earlier this week.

“He’s probably shooting the ball as good as anybody in the country over the last 10, 11 games,” Oats said. “You go back and look at what he shot the first three games of the year when he really struggled. If you take those three out, he might be shooting the ball better than anybody in the country.

“But he’s also one of the best two-way players in the league. I mean when you look at his defensive numbers, he’s really locked into the defensive end. You can put him on the other team’s best 2, 3 or 4, that best wing player off the ball, and he’s done a great job shutting them down.

— Alabama guard James “Beetle” Bolden leads the team with 11 charges over 12 games despite being the smallest player on the Crimson Tide’s roster at 6-foot, 160 pounds. Friday, the graduate transfer explained his hard-nosed approach.

“It’s just toughness,” Bolden said. “I learned that from my guy Coach Huggs (Bob Huggins) at West Virginia. He installed that in me because he prides himself on defense. I just look to stay in there and be the tough dude.”

— Lewis leads the SEC and ranks seventh in the nation in minutes per game (37.5). The sophomore guard is eighth in the SEC in assists (4.6 per game) and fifth in the league in steals (1.9 per game). When asked Friday where he’s seen the biggest improvement in his game, Lewis mentioned his ability to take care of the ball. Over Alabama’s first 10 games, he was averaging 4.5 turnovers a game. Over the Crimson Tide’s past four games, that number has dropped to 1.75 turnovers per game.

“Earlier in the year, I had a lot of turnovers,” Lewis said. “Now I feel like me getting well with the offense, I just reduced them dramatically.”

— Kentucky is outscoring the competition by 12.5 points per game and owns a +6.5 advantage on the glass. The Wildcats are shooting 46.4 percent from the floor, 30.1 percent from beyond the arc. Kentucky leads the SEC and ranks No. 9 nationally shooting 78.2 percent from the free-throw line.

— Kentucky is looking for its 1,000th regular-season SEC win, becoming the first program in the conference’s history to reach the milestone. The Wildcats already are the first basketball program to reach 2,000 total victories.

— Saturday’s game will mark the 152nd meeting on the hardwood between Alabama and Kentucky. The Wildcats hold a 113-38 edge in the all-time series. The 151 games played in the series stands as UA’s fifth-most common opponent in program history.

— The Crimson Tide is 10-57 all-time against the Wildcats in Lexington and owns a 6-25 mark against Kentucky in Rupp Arena. Alabama has lost eight straight games when playing Kentucky in Lexington. The last time Alabama won at Rupp Arena came during a 68-64 victory over Kentucky on Jan. 14, 2006.

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We are +9 tomorrow.

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