Takeaways from Alabama Basketball's Overtime Win Over Arkansas
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — It was senior day in Tuscaloosa on Saturday afternoon, and Alabama basketball sent its senior class out with a thrilling overtime victory over Arkansas, winning by a final score of 92-88.
For the second year in a row, Alabama wore crimson jerseys for its final home game of the regular season, and for the second year in a row, the Crimson Tide erased a 15-plus-point deficit and won in overtime in the crimson threads.
The win secures a double-bye in the SEC Tournament for Alabama, and ends its regular season 21-10 with a 13-5 mark in league play.
Here are my thoughts from the game:
1. Latrell Wrightsell makes this team go.
There is a legitimate argument that the most important player on the Alabama basketball team wears No. 12.
Wrightsell has become the true x-factor of this team, with Alabama being 9-0 in games where Wrightsell scored at least 10 points in the game.
Alabama fell into its slump when Wrightsell went out, going 2-3 across a 5-game stretch where he either missed the game or was limited to a pitch count.
But he was back in full-form against the Razorbacks. For the game, Wrightsell scored 20 points on 8-of-12 shooting, including 4-of-8 from beyond the arc. He was a major factor in Alabama's run in the second half to get back in the game, and he knocked down the game-tying shot that ended up sending the game to overtime.
"We need him in a bad way," Alabama head coach Nate Oats said. "He played almost 40 minutes, he made some tough plays. You can tell he's probably not quite in good enough shape to play 40 minutes, but he had to."
The importance Wrightsell has to this team can't be understated. He has the lowest turnover rate of any guard on the team, he is 100 percent from the free throw line on the season, and he shoots over 44 percent from three on the season. If there's a type of winning play that needs to be made, odds are Wrightsell is a player that can, and will make it.
Oats didn't mince words when he talked about what this team could have done if Wrightsell had never gotten hurt.
"I feel like if we had him in some of those games he was out, we wouldn't have lost some of the ones we did," Oats said. "We'd have a league championship if he hadn't gone down."
Now we'll never know the true answer to that question, but what we do know is Wrightsell is vital to this team's success, and his play is sure to be a difference-maker as March rolls on.
2. Sam Walters came up huge in OT.
With Wrightsell playing as well as he was, especially after hitting the game-tying shot to force overtime, there felt like a collective gasp in the room when he checked out of the game early in the overtime period and slowly left the court.
Oats looked down his bench and inserted Sam Walters, who immediately hit a three to put Alabama up two points. Then the next Alabama possession, Walters grabbed an offensive rebound and put it back in, so Alabama could maintain the lead.
Walters' strong overtime period ended with a breakaway dunk with four seconds to go, giving him seven points in the period and 10 for the game.
"I was super happy for him. He's a kid that's shot it well early, struggled, maybe this can get his confidence back going," Oats said. "I think [the putback] made him happier than anything he did all game, which is great. He's trying really hard to make tough plays, and he made some."
Walters has shown how lethal of a shooter he can be, and how dangerous he is as a weapon in this Alabama offense, but he's hit a bit of a freshman wall that was holding him back until the overtime period against Arkansas.
He hadn't made a three in four consecutive games heading into Saturday, but the way he played against the Razorbacks was huge not only for his own confidence entering tournament play, but for Alabama's as it's still dealing with injuries to its starting lineup.
3. The win was needed in every way.
Obviously, you want to win the game every time you play, but this win specifically was important for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it secured a double-bye in the SEC Tournament. The extra day of rest is huge for guys like Rylan Griffen dealing with an injury, and also keeps your hopes alive of winning the thing, since winning four games in four days is nearly impossible in a league this deep.
Secondly, it ended a 2-game losing skid. Alabama hadn't lost back-to-back games since December, and hadn't lost back-to-back games in SEC play in over two years. Losing a third straight game entering tournament play, where the next two tournaments are one-loss-and-done, would have been absolutely disastrous.
"You don't want to base everything you do off wins and losses, we need to be mature enough to walk in on Monday and learn from this, but at the end of the day, you keep score to get a winner and a loser at the end," Oats said. "We figured out a way to make enough winning plays throughout the end of the game to get a win in the end, and we need to know we've got winners. We've got guys who are seasoned vets who know how to win games when you're not playing your best."
"We didn't play very well at Florida. I thought the guys had a little quit in them at Florida. We let the guys know, this isn't who we are."
For Alabama to be able to bounce back from a loss and get a win in a game where it didn't play well by any means, is huge for the team's confidence as the most important stretch of the season has arrived.
Who knows, maybe what this team needed was to end a game with a win, and this could spur on a run in Nashville. Only time will tell, but the team took a step in the right direction by digging in and getting a win on Saturday.
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