Which brings us to the men’s basketball program, and the ongoing efforts to budge into conversations about the best.
It hasn’t often come close to that. Alabama has had empirically good years, notably a period under the watches of C.M. Newton and then Wimp Sanderson from the mid-1970s through the early ’90s featuring 12 NCAA Tournament appearances and seven runs to the Sweet 16. The Crimson Tide have reached one Elite Eight, in 2004, and have never been to the Final Four. It’s not a place without history, but it is a place that’s not enjoyed historically great men’s basketball moments. It has not been, to stretch the analogy, Michigan or Virginia in this regard.
The current group is taking its shot at changing the paradigm; if you don’t remember Alabama being this good, chances are it wasn’t. Hence the contract extension delivered to Oats, 46, just last week, before his second year at the helm is even complete, with the deal now running through the end of the 2027 season and lifting his compensation clear of the $3 million a year mark. A nod to the deft button-pushing Oats and his staff have done in 2020-21, for sure, but also a statement about the investment the school is making in its expectations of excellence. “When we hired (Oats),” Byrne says, “I said we’ll continue to grow you and grow the program as time goes on, and that’s what we’re committed to doing.”
On the floor, the implementation and execution of a free-flowing, analytics-heavy offense aren’t entirely beside the point; getting a group to do what you want, and do it well, requires a coach to be good at his job. But Alabama played fast and shot a lot of 3s last year and is doing both of those things again this year, if only slightly more effectively (24th in adjusted efficiency this season versus 37th last year). It’s understandable why people would conclude this is the reason the Crimson Tide have won 18 of 23 games and 13 of 14 in the SEC and have a commanding lead atop the league, but it undersells how deftly Oats and his staff grew the operation into a national contender.
This is the people variable in the equation: Coaches made decisions, strategic and otherwise, that might’ve submarined the effort had the strategies failed or broke badly. They didn’t. And here Alabama is.
Of all the endeavors that fall into this category, transforming Alabama into an elite defensive unit is the most consequential, and oddly the part for which Oats doesn’t get quite enough credit. The Crimson Tide ranked 114th in defensive efficiency in his first season; they started this week ranked second nationally in that department. It’s not a philosophical accident. Oats’ best Buffalo teams were edgy and unrelenting on that end of the floor, and the raft of long, interchangeable pieces on the Alabama roster suggested something similar could be done in 2020-21. This requires buy-in, though. And it’s much easier to get kids on board to play fast and shoot quickly than it is to persuade them to get in a stance.
Some of it is attributable to savvy personnel maneuvering. Landing forward Jordan Bruner as a grad transfer was about locating and inserting a linchpin on the defensive end as much as anything; Yale was 18 points better per 100 possessions with the 6-foot-10 Bruner on the floor in 2019-20. Some of it is simply reinforcing the principle during offseason preparation, like any coach in any program might. “There would be days where it would just be all defense,” sophomore guard Jaden Shackelford says. There are persnickety film sessions in which Oats and the staff identify poor rotations and missed assignments. “Just because someone missed,” junior guard Keon Ellis says, “doesn’t mean we played good defense.”
But a good part of it, too, was selling a vision. Burrowing into a player’s mind and leaving behind an idea that the player can’t shake. It’s how you turn Jaden Shackelford, Freshman Liability, into Jaden Shackelford, Sophomore Who Likes to Play Defense, with a little help at home from Dad.
In his first season at Alabama, the 6-foot-3 guard had a defensive box score plus-minus of minus-0.2, per Basketball Reference. “Shackelford wasn’t a very good defender last year,” Oats says, “and that might be an understatement.” One of the subjects of the standard coach-player debrief last spring was the imperative for Shackelford to become more reliable on that end. Oats framed it in a way to which most former top-100 recruits would respond: It was what Shackelford needed to do to put himself in the best position for a basketball life after college.
At home, while training remotely during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shackelford made defensive drills a staple of workouts with his father. Improved lateral quickness was a top priority, so the younger Shackelford slid across the floor with weights strapped to him. It says quite a bit about the message Oats was able to drive home; he essentially informed a player that his basketball health depended on drinking more milk, and the player bought it. “You usually don’t go into the gym saying, I’m about to do 50 defensive slides, close-outs, stuff like that,” Shackelford says. “But, I mean, once you do it, it pays off. Trust me.”
Upon Shackelford’s return to campus, the process evolved into more assiduous and pointed film study, and the ability to exploit tendencies as a defender. His goal now is to draw on-ball charges as often as he can, and he wouldn’t be able to accomplish that goal without an intentional approach to preparation. “If I’m closing out to a guard that loves to attack with the ball and re-attack?” the sophomore says. “If he’s a strong right, I’m going to close out, step to the left. If I cut him off, he’s going to drive again and I’m going to take a charge. There’s a lot to it, but at the same time, it’s just guarding your man.”
. Oh and on the girls. Maybe they did talk to you about that part.
