Alabama players, coaches celebrate beating Clemson, cut down nets after reaching first-ever Final Four
Alabama won the West Region final on Saturday night, 89-82 over Clemson, at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The Crimson Tide are headed to the Final Four for the first time in school history.
The Alabama men’s basketball team is used to cutting down nets, but their celebration on Saturday night was the first of its kind in school history.
The Crimson Tide beat Clemson, 89-82, in the Elite Eight. They’re headed to the Final Four for the first time ever. They’ll play the University of Connecticut, the defending NCAA champions and No. 1 overall seed in this year’s tournament, at State Farm Stadium in Phoenix on Saturday.
Alabama celebrated their historic win on Saturday night on the floor of Crypto.com Arena by raising the golden West Region trophy and cutting down the nets. Bama247 captured video of the celebration, which you can see below
Nate Oats lays out Alabama’s path to beat ‘daunting’ UConn in Final Four
Beating top-ranked UConn will be a “daunting” task for Alabama, but Nate Oats believes Alabama’s running game can help.
With the undisputed best team in college basketball on deck for Alabama in the Final Four this Saturday, coach Nate Oats knows it’s a “daunting task” for his team, he said Monday evening on his “Hey Coach” radio show. But that does not mean he thinks his team will cower in the moment.
“Our schedule allowed us to be comfortable playing the best teams in the country,” Oats said. “We’re gonna be comfortable — now, UConn’s been playing much better than everybody. They’re really good. We’re gonna have to play well, but I don’t think our guys are gonna come in intimidated.
“We’ve played some really good teams. Now, they’re better on both sides of the ball than most of the teams we’ve played. But we’re going to get a game plan together but I think our guys will come in ready to play with them.”
Part of that game plan will involve turning up the speed of the game. Alabama has the ninth-fastest tempo in KenPom.com’s rankings, while UConn is 315th in Division I.
“We’d be much better off getting in a running game with these guys, having a higher-scoring game,” Oats told ESPN’s “College Gameday” on Sunday.
That’s a point Oats repeated Monday night on his radio show, saying, “We’re gonna try to run them. … The higher scoring the game, I think the better off we are.”
Of course, that’s easier said than done against the defending national champion Huskies, which rank first in KenPom’s offensive efficiency and fourth in defensive efficiency. Both sides of the court were clicking for UConn as they pulled away from Illinois with a 30-0 second-half run Saturday in the Elite Eight.
“They’re pretty good in transition themselves,” Oats said Monday evening. “But we’re gonna give it a go, though.”
Alabama has the offensive firepower to match UConn, ranking third in KenPom’s efficiency metric. But Alabama is 104th in defense, which could limit the number of defensive stops that fuel the transition game Oats desires.
“Their offensive end, [Donovan] Clingan is a monster,” Oats told ESPN on Sunday. “We’ve struggled with some bigs. Do you double and risk their giving their shooters open looks? If you don’t double, Clingan is gonna off on you. You’ve got to kind of pick your poison with them a little bit. We’re not gonna pitch a shutout. Our defense isn’t that good and their offense is too good.”
Illinois, with the nation’s fourth-ranked offense, managed only 52 points and 25 percent shooting against the Huskies. Only seven opponents have managed 70 points against UConn this season, which enters Saturday’s game 35-3. UConn beat two of the only three teams that scored 80 against them.
“They’re hard to score on,” Oats said Sunday to ESPN. “We’re gonna have to figure out ways to score on them.”
Defensively, Alabama had season-long struggles against opposing big men who could score. The Tide limited damage from North Carolina’s Armando Bacot to 19 points in 34 minutes during a Sweet 16 win Thursday, double-teaming him at times. But Clingan — a potential top-3 NBA draft pick in June — could pose a bigger problem and has better shooting around him. Oats said Alabama’s third-party analytics company ranks Clingan as the nation’s second-best big man behind Purdue’s Zach Edey.
“Edey is the best big in a long time in college basketball, so if it wasn’t for Edey, Clingan would be the best post-up big in the country almost every other year,” Oats told reporters Sunday after landing at the Tuscaloosa airport. “They have him, but they also have Cam Spencer can really shoot it. Tristen Newton is gonna be a first-round pick, probably a lottery pick. You kind of go down the line. Everybody they play in the rotation is solid, good. North Carolina had some non-shooters we were able to play off of. UConn doesn’t have that as much. We’re gonna have to come up with a little different game plan to try to negate Clingan.
“I thought we had a good plan against Bacot. We struggled against some of these bigs. I think it’s good we played them. We played Creighton. [Ryan] Kalkbrenner is a really good big. We’ve played some of the best bigs in the country, which is good. We’ve got to come up with a plan on this one.”
Alabama will keep practices lighter for most of this week as Oats hopes to keep players’ legs fresh for Saturday. Behind the scenes, his staff of assistants in Ryan Pannone, Austin Claunch, Preston Murphy and Adam Bauman will be working overtime to solve the puzzle of UConn.
“We’ve got our hands full trying to get out of that first game in the Final Four, but we’re gonna give it everything we got,” Oats said Monday. “We’ll get a game plan together. Our staff has been on it. We’ve got some basketball junkies on staff that have put together some pretty good game plans. We’ll get a good game plan in place.
“Then, we’ve had the players step up game after game after game. I’m pretty confident we’ll have some guys step up on Saturday.”
Leave a Reply