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.

Bama going into the tournament was 100+ in efficiency defense.

The change from guys like Griffen, Nelson and Pringle has been night and day and is the only reason Bama made the Elite 8 given the injury to Wrightsell.

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.

Oh okay i just looked at the individual UNC players' stats more closely. I guess Oats wanted to sell out to defend the inside so to speak. Almost put you guys in a hole early on. I thought Bama was done for when they went down by 8.

Guess he needed a bigger spotlight to ballout. His three point stats were indeed terrible headed in.

I'm not reading that.

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).

quote:

---

I thought Bama was done for when they went down by 8.

---

Yeah, when their not-so-great shooters were draining 3’s, I got worried.

The problem was the Coach did not seem to have a plan for the subs off the bench who could actually shoot (LOL) he stated we had to tweak that a bit. They stayed with it, but I bet when those guys came off the bench in the 2nd half they guarded them.

Davis on the other hand is not a good coach. Being up at halftime by 8, a good coach would have understood what Bama's coach was doing, playing a pressure mini zone (a Box & 1 Wimp Sandersons fav. defense ) with one free player (Baby Face Nelson) roaming around the free-throw line to challenge anything coming down the lane.

Davis should have said, look guys, yes we hit 10-16 three pointers, but they want to make this an up and down game, and get us tired, and if we keep shooting threes they can beat us if we go cold, so lets control the clock, go down low, and kick it out when double teams, lets not jack up threes because they are sagging off, that's the only way we can lose with an 8 point lead.

If he keeps feeding the post, going inside out, running the clock every trip down, UNC would have won that game imho. RJ was 0-9 from three, stop shooting already. 4-20 overall, its not your night, feed the bigs !!