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Nate Oats met with reporters on Saturday night following Alabama’s season-ending loss to Duke in the Elite Eight.
After scoring 113 points against BYU in the Sweet 16, the Crimson Tide had a much tougher night offensively against the Blue Devils. Alabama fell 85-65 and went just 8-of-32 from beyond the arc in the loss.
After the game, Oats acknowledged the disappointing result so soon after one of Alabama’s best games of the year against BYU.
“We obviously played two nights ago and it’s tough within 48 hours from playing as well as we did to playing as poorly as we did,” Oats said. “That’s how the NCAA Tournament works in an one-game elimination tournament. You play poorly and you get sent home, and that’s what happened.”
Alabama’s offense thrives on creating looks from 3-point range and at the rim, but Duke was able to take away both of those avenues on Saturday night. Freshman center Khaman Maluach was extremely impactful on the interior in limiting Alabama’s success at the rim.
“You look at their starting lineup, they’ve got Khaman Maluach that has a 9’8 reach, he protects the rim at a high level,” Oats said. “But when they’ve got a rim protector, it’s hard to get rim shoots. At the rim we shot 48 percent, we only made 12 shots at the rim tonight. We were 12 of 25. You know, he made that tough.”
Beyond the poor rim finishing and lackluster 3-point shooting, there were several other elements of this game that left Oats frustrated as well.
“We still got some decent looks from three and we just didn’t hit them,” Oats said. “They shot 6 of 13, we shot 8 of 32, so we shot 25 percent from three. Is that good enough to beat Duke? Yeah, if you do everything else at an elite level and we didn’t do that. We didn’t finish at the paint, didn’t get to the O-boards well enough. We had too many turnovers. We had three turnovers before the first media time-out, which dug us a huge hole right out of the gate.”
Oats and his Alabama staff will now get to work on re-building this roster for next season. Alabama has reached at least the Sweet 16 in 3 consecutive years.
Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.
