Alabama basketball playing Nate Oats' version of moneyball, and it's working | Goodbread
Moneyball, the universal term for the use of analytics in sports, brings about absolute devotion in a few coaches, absolute disdain in others and, for most, a carefully-considered blend of the two.
Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats is all in, and it's no secret.
"Offensively, they play Moneyballesque," said Texas A&M coach Buzz Williams after watching the Crimson Tide's latest scoring onslaught on Saturday.
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Williams had no answers for Alabama's school-record eighth 100-point game of the season, a 100-75 dismantling of his Aggies, except to tip his hat in postgame comments to what was an awfully good-looking argument for Oats' affection for all the data points he can get his hands on. Central among the analytical precepts to which he adheres is that two-point shot attempts that aren't layups or dunks present too much risk for too little reward. No coach in the game is more willing to live and die by the 3-pointer, and on Saturday, live wasn't the word for it.
Alabama fired 41 3-point attempts and buried a whopping 18 of them at a 44% clip, enough to beat any team in the country on a given day. The 18 makes were just one shy of a season high, but the 41 attempts weren't close to the 48 the Crimson Tide launched in a 99-67 rout of Mississippi State on Feb. 3. The attempts are relevant here, because TAMU could've made a much higher percentage of its threes (4 of 23) and still lost, in part because it let 18 fewer of them fly. Meanwhile, A&M dominated the boards (49-38, including an incredible 26 offensive rebounds), scored more than Alabama in the paint, had more second-chance points – and still got blown out.
Oats wouldn't mind getting into the 40s in 3-point attempts every game and take his chances on how many of them fall. He certainly has the marksmen for it.
Guard Latrell Wrightsell, whom Oats called one of the best shooters he's ever coached, has gotten an earful from the coach this season when he's passed up open looks from 3-point range. It happened again Saturday, although Wrightsell, who said he took more of a shooter's mindset into the second half, did more than his part in sinking 4 of 8 from long range.
Shooters go cold, of course, and that can be a prickly problem, especially away from home. Whether Alabama can muster the defense and rebounding necessary to win postseason games when it's not red-hot from the arc will determine how deep into March this team will still be bouncing balls.
But on Saturday, the waves of Alabama 3-point possessions – along with 18 treys, UA also converted three old-fashioned 3-point plays – just kept coming, and Williams was at a loss to slow it down. At one point, UA went on a 12-2 run in the first half in just five possessions: 3-pointers from Sam Walters, Mark Sears and Jarin Stevenson, plus an and-one conversion from Walters, to open a 21-10 lead.
It was too much for A&M.
It's too much for any team when the Crimson Tide rips off multiple such runs in a single game, as it did vs. A&M.
And that doesn't take much analyzing.
Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Alabama basketball makes the case for moneyball and analytics
