Bama's defense

Our game plan was to leave a couple of their guys wide open to encourage them to shoot. It was just shite luck that a 16% 3 point shooter drained his first two looks before missing the next one about 5 feet wide right.

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had guys passing the ball to guys wide open on the perimeter for unguarded shots that some decent highschool players would easily sink.

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If you listened to Nate at the half, that was by design because the guys that made those shots hadn't made them with any consistency all year and he thought rebounding was more important. Made adjustments and closed it down in the second half. RJ Davis having an off night was good as well.

I think Alabama was very worried about getting beat up in the paint, so they were willing to leave some of those 3 opportunities open. Several of the UNC perimeter players didn’t have that great of a 3 point shooting percentage this season, excluding Cormac Ryan, obviously. Unfortunately, those guys were draining 3’s.

It was certainly bad luck early that the two guys Alabama wanted to shoot it from behind the arc made their first 4 shots.

One guy that made his first 2 3pts shots had made 8 of 38 all season and the other was similar.

However, people watching often over react and Oats, like all good coaches, didn't.

Any "adjustment" wasn't much to be honest. Nelson and usually one more perimeter player kept almost ignoring those UNC guards on the perimeter to hound Bacot.

That strategy ended up:

1) making those players more prone to take 3s (they had a few players shoot multiple threes that were averaging less than 1 per game) instead of playing more slowly and working it inside.

2) creating the frenetic tempo that favored Alabama

3) clearly frustrating Bacot who was the player Alabama was most worried about

4) not overly concerning Alabama since they have the firepower to overcome a barrage of threes pushing a deficit to 10 points as long as the tempo is high


The percentages evened out over the course of the game too. UNC was shooting 60% on threes in the first half and shot around 15% the 2nd half on the same amount of attempts (way too many for the advantage they had in post scoring).