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Someone better leave an early wake-up call for Alabama basketball at SEC Tournament | Hurt
Alabama basketball won the SEC regular-season championship, but it better be ready when tournament play begins Friday at 11 a.m. in Nashville.
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Maybe Nate Oats needs to be knocking on doors at 5 a.m. Maybe, in honor of Alabama basketball’s next game being in Nashville, he should add Jason Isbell’s “If We Were Vampires” to the musical mix of his daylight-hating team.
Whatever it takes, the Crimson Tide's coach will be looking for a formula to end the slow starts that Alabama has had in early games. With a Friday tipoff time at 11 a.m. against either Kentucky or Mississippi State at the SEC Tournament, there can be no lingering around for room-service breakfast.
The Crimson Tide overcame a sluggish 15 minutes at the beginning of the Georgia game Saturday, dominating the second half in an 89-79 win. But not all the opponents in the postseason, SEC or NCAA, will be as generous as Georgia, which gave up 20 turnovers and 14 offensive rebounds to give Alabama the possessions it needed to survive and thrive.
"I thought (our) guys weren't ready to play, and it shows up on defense and offense both," Oats said. "Twenty-two turnovers is a lot. To score 89 points in a game where you have 22 turnovers means when you weren't turning the ball over we were pretty good, pretty efficient. If we can get those turnovers cut down, I think we can get our offense back to where we need it to be.
“I thought our defensive effort was good for about 28 minutes. That’s got to be better in Nashville.”
Alabama has already beaten each of its potential Friday opponents – Kentucky and Mississippi State – twice in the regular season. Aside from invoking the old “hard to beat a team three times” cliché, either team won’t be an easy out. Neither has any road to Indiana for the NCAA Tournament unless it wins four games and an automatic bid in Nashville. Both Mississippi State games and the second meeting with Kentucky were the sort of grind-it-out contests that typified February for UA.
A back-to-the-wall Kentucky team, even with its usual Nashville home-away-from-home crowd reduced by COVID-19 attendance limits, won’t be easy, especially given Alabama’s long SEC Tournament struggles against its blue nemesis. UK has eliminated Alabama 11 times since the last UA tournament win over the Wildcats in 1983. Oats and his team don’t carry any of that history, but have to be wide awake in order to change it.
There were positive signs in the win at Georgia. All the major contributors added something, whether it was Jahvon Quinerly’s bench scoring, a more relaxed offensive approach from John Petty Jr. or two critical defensive stops down the stretch by Herbert Jones. The second half had welcome glimpses of January, but the key in Nashville will be to have those glimpses in the opening minutes as well.
