After learning the basics early in the season, can Alabama basketball pass the Tennessee test?.
The most important game for the Alabama Crimson Tide basketball team in 2023–24 will take place on Saturday. Despite their six-game winning streak, head coach Nate Oats and his team are currently outside of the AP Top 25 rankings as a result of their difficult non-conference schedule. The Crimson Tide will face the No. 6 Tennessee Volunteers at Thompson-Boling Arena on Saturday at 1 p.m. CT. They hope to demonstrate to themselves that the early-season setbacks were worthwhile for long-term success.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the clash for Alabama because the outcome probably matters much more than a single victory or defeat. In addition to preserving their perfect conference record and locking up Alabama’s top slot in the league alongside the Auburn Tigers, the Crimson Tide are looking for their first top-10 victory of the year and their third Quad 1 victory to add to their tournament resume.
In case it wasn’t sufficient to ready the Alabama squad for a prominent match on ESPN2, there’s also a small amount of past between the Volunteers and Crimson Tide. During his time in Tuscaloosa, Oats is 3-3 against Tennessee, with Rick Barnes often challenging Oats for conference supremacy. During Oats’s career, Barnes led his team to the NCAA Tournament every year and made it to the Sweet 16 twice. In 2022, Barnes won the SEC Tournament. This season, Alabama hasn’t performed well in highly anticipated games. The truth is that the Crimson Tide fell short against Ohio State in a neutral site game, No. 2 Purdue in Canada, No. 18 Creighton on the road, and No. 12 Arizona in Phoenix.
The Crimson Tide led the second halves of their games against the Boilermakers, Wildcats, and Bluejays, but in the end, they let each one slip away. What, then, did the Crimson Tide learn about themselves from those defeats?
Honestly the biggest thing that we learned in those three was that we were right there with all three of them for large parts of the game. Everyone of those three games we had at least a six-point lead in the second half and a 75% or greater winning-percentage, you know how they do that whatever, and we coughed them up. Now, Tennessee’s – we played them away from Coleman, those other three. Only one of those was a true road game,” said Oats on Friday.
This would therefore be a legitimate conference road game in a slightly different setting. Maybe our men have gotten a little better at holding a lead if we are lucky enough to get one. They will be aware that they will have to compete for forty minutes. It can go the other way, so you can’t escape. We may trail significantly and need to rally, or you could lead much or it could be close the entire game—within a few possessions. You must play forty. Playing 28 or 32 is not enough to win these kind of games. Everyone must put up their best effort for 40 minutes.”
Alabama held a seven-point lead over Purdue with 14 minutes left to play, the Tide was up six-points over Creighton with 15 minutes left in the game and held a six-point leave over Arizona with almost 16 minutes to go. Alabama faltered in all three matchups, squandering prime opportunities for resume-building wins that go a long way toward seeding in the NCAA Tournament.
Five more regular season games against elite opposition remain for Oats and company. In addition to playing Tennessee and Auburn at home, the Tide will also travel to play the Kentucky Wildcats. The Tide will need to perform well in victories to build confidence for postseason play, in addition to scraping together a winning record in those five games to retain their conference title during the regular season.
The teams that are now on a six-game winning streak have defeated Eastern Kentucky by 44 points, Liberty by 45 points, South Carolina by 27 points, and Missouri by 18 points at home. They have also defeated Vanderbilt on the road by a tight margin and defeated Mississippi State with grit and determination.
The Tide’s record only includes the victory over the Bulldogs at Starkville as a Quad 1 victory, and the only opponent to rank in the top 50 of KenPom’s analytic rankings is Mississippi State. If you take out the Bulldogs, the other five teams have an average KenPom ranking of 117, so they’re not exactly opponents you’d see in the NCAA Tournament. During the Tide’s three most important non-conference games, one significant issue was at the charity stripe. Against Purdue, Creighton, and Arizona, Mohamed Wague and Nick Pringle both fouled out, forcing their opponents to the free-throw line 28, 29, and 37 times, respectively.
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