Alabama Athletics
Alabama Basketball Aims to Bounce Back Against Furman
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After a disappointing 1-2 start, Alabama basketball prepares to face Furman on Tuesday.
The Crimson Tide return to Tuscaloosa after a road trip to Rhode Island, which saw Alabama fall to the Rams 93-79 on Friday.
“There’s a lot of stuff we need to clean up,” Alabama head coach Nate Oats said. “We’d like to be 3-0 right now. We’re not. Nothing’s come easy to us so far with the injuries. Not to make excuses for anything at all but we’ve faced some adversity we gotta answer. We gotta do better with it I think we get better.”
The injuries and adversity that Oats is addressing has to do with freshman forward Juwan Gary, junior forward James Rojas and sophomore guard Jahvon Quinerly. Both Gary and Rojas suffered season-ending injuries before the season even started, and the program is still having to adjust after Quinerly’s waiver appeal was revoked by the NCAA.
Oats emphasized that despite the team’s problems, he would rather the team be needing adjustments and development at this point in the season than later on down the road.
“I’ll say this, though,” Oats said. “I’ve always scheduled this way. I would rather play tough teams early, get exposed and fix it, then play a bunch of cupcakes, get overconfident and then have to fix it in conference. I’d rather be playing our best basketball come the middle of January, the middle of February, March—which I feel like our Buffalo teams did every year—rather than playing our best basketball in November and December.”
While the Crimson Tide improved on several of its struggles in its last game, turnovers remained a huge issue. Against Rhode Island, Alabama lost the ball 22 times, resulting in 33 points for the Rams.
“The biggest problem is our turnovers,” Oats said. “We like to play fast. We’re playing fast. Our skill level is probably not where it needs to be. It’s also the only third game in this system—they gotta get used to it. They definitely were not used to playing at this speed here before.”
After three games played, the Crimson Tide is currently tied for 244th in the NCAA with 56 turnovers.
“We’re one of the worst teams right now in the country in turning the ball over but we gotta get more guys used to handling the ball, more guys used to playing downhill, more guys used to playing in attacking mode and making those reads—playing as fast as we’d like ‘em,” Oats said. “Some of that’s a new system, some of that’s—I gotta do a better job teaching them how the play we wanna play.”
Now, with Rhode Island out of the way, Alabama basketball now sets its sights on the Furman Paladins, who are off to a red-hot 4-0 start.
Furman’s numbers are impressive. The Paladins have outscored their opponents by and average of 24.3 points per game while shooting 52.6 percent from the field. Furman also shoots 36.0 percent from 3-point range and has a season percentage of 77.8 from the free-throw line.
Two of the Paladins’ four wins were on the road, so the Crimson Tide needs to be sure to take this team seriously lest it make a rough start to the season even worse.
“They’re really good,” Oats said. “They’re one of those mid-majors that’s got all the confidence in the world. They beat high majors last year and they’ve got skilled enough players that can take you one-on-one. They can make shots, they’re disciplined, they’re well-coached so it’s going to be a big test.”
Oats compared Furman to Penn, who Alabama lost to in its season opener 81-80 on Nov. 5.
“They’re a little bit similar to Penn in the style that they play and that they’ve—you know Penn beat Villanova just like Furman did last year—they’ve beat some high majors so we just gotta do a better job than we did against Penn in executing the game plan,” Oats said. “Now this is three games after Penn so can we—have we matured since the Penn game? I sure hope so.”
Alabama and Furman tip off Tuesday in Coleman Coliseum at 7 p.m. CT (SEC Network+).
