Alabama basketball's 5-star freshman, Jarin Stevenson, looks ready for takeoff | Goodbread
Jarin Stevenson let his fourth 3-point attempt of the night fly from the home-bench corner, so close to being out of bounds that fellow big men Mo Wague and Grant Nelson, on the bench at the time, were just a step behind him. The energy of another Alabama basketball run had them standing, not sitting, and they extended an arm and three fingers to signal the score even before it found the bottom of the net.
Stevenson has been playing more of late, and there aren't so many minutes for bigs to compete for in an offense that isn't afraid to put four guards on the floor at once. But they all wanted this shot for the freshman.
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The Crimson Tide (16-6, 8-1 SEC) has the look of an unselfish team.
You can see it in moments like that. You could especially see it in the moments after the final horn of Alabama's 99-67 thrashing of Mississippi State Saturday at Coleman Coliseum. Guard Kai Spears, a walk-on until being awarded a scholarship this week, had buried a 3-pointer in the final minute to punctuate the blowout, and when the clock hit zero, a jovial Nick Pringle, currently suspended from the team, grabbed Spears around the legs and picked him up as if to carry him off the floor. A guy who could be one wrong step away from being off the team putting a practice player on his shoulders?
That's a tight-knit group, and if Stevenson is about to start scoring like he did Saturday for a team that's already been scoring almost at will, it's going to be a darned good one, too.
"That allows us to play a little bit bigger," Oats said of Stevenson's hot shooting. "We've kind of put the four guards in for offense, but if you've got a 6-10 guy at (power forward) shooting 4-of-6 from three, (we can) rebound better and have some size on defense, and play him a lot more next to Grant (Nelson) at (center)."
Stevenson, a true freshman who was a 5-star recruit from Pittsboro, N.C., came to Alabama with high expectations. In the preseason, even Oats compared his game to that of Noah Clowney, whose freshman year at Alabama last year made him the No. 21 overall pick of the NBA Draft by the Brooklyn Nets. It's been a much slower ascent for Stevenson, but he's ascending nonetheless.
That fourth 3-point try from the corner also happened to be Stevenson's fourth consecutive make, and by night's end, he'd contributed 14 points for his first SEC game as a double-digit scorer. Until Wednesday night, he hadn't scored in double figures since a non-conference win over Arkansas State two months ago. Entering play, he'd averaged 16 minutes per game, but he's played at least 20 for four consecutive games now.
He's coming on strong.
And at the halfway point of the SEC schedule, so is Alabama.
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's Jarin Stevenson looks ready for takeoff
