Nate Oats addresses his push, Dennis Gates asks questions after chippy Alabama-Missouri game
Missouri coach Dennis Gates asked almost as many questions as there were reporters at his postgame news conference.
He was asked about the overall physicality and chippiness of the game against Alabama basketball and what was behind it.
"The chippiness?" he replied.
"Yeah, the overall physicality and chippiness," the reporter said.
"Both teams just playing hard," Gates said. "Ultimately, our guys played hard, they played hard. That’s what the flow of the game presented. Ultimately, if you’re in those situations, you want the ball to bounce in your favor and get more baskets or more free throws, but that wasn’t the case. We came away with zero free throws in the first half. You said it was a chippy game, right? Right? You said that right?"
A question that at first sounded rhetorical wasn't, it turns out. Gates paused, waiting for an answer.
"I did," the reporter said.
“Correct?" Gates replied. "We shot zero free throws in the first half. I don’t know.”
Gates spoke with the same edge in the press conference that permeated the game that Alabama went on to win 93-75.
Pushing, shoving and technical fouls persisted throughout the contest on Tuesday at Coleman Coliseum, and one push that wasn't called created the most postgame chatter.
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During a scuffle in front of Alabama's bench in the first half, Crimson Tide guard Aaron Estrada exchanged words with Missouri's Aidan Shaw. Then Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats pushed Shaw away, toward the Tigers' bench.
Oats didn't waste anytime addressing it in his postgame remarks. Before he took questions, Oats walked out with symbolic hat in hand.
"Before I start talking about the game, I just want to address the situation at the under-eight (minutes) media timeout," Oats said.
He went on to mention the scuffle and talked about how he's known Gates for a long time, mentioning the respect he has for Gates' coaching career.
"No disrespect to him or his program," Oats said. "I apologized to both coach Gates and Aiden Shaw. Aiden seems like a great kid, and it’s an unfortunate situation and I apologized to both of them. I wanted to address that before I got going."
Gates was asked about that moment as well, and he mentioned Oats' apology to him. But then Gates returned to asking questions.
"I just pose the question, if that was players in the huddle, with a hand on an opponent, what would take place?" Gates said "It would be an automatic technical foul. I saw two referees in the huddle. It wasn’t a technical foul. But that’s the question I would pose. If it was players, making hand contact, what would take place?"
Oats was not assessed a technical foul, nor was anyone else as the result of the first-half kerfuffle. Still, it was the posterchild moment for a night where nobody was about to give anyone on the other team a hug.
That back-and-forth provided the strongest fuel for a game where it always seemed one push or shove away from another disruption or commotion.
It led to a game that won't be remembered for the big baskets as much as it will be remembered for the chippy moments and a strange postgame news conference featuring one coach having to be apologetic and another coach who kept asking questions.
Some rhetorical, some not.
Nick Kelly is the Alabama beat writer for The Tuscaloosa News, part of the USA TODAY Network, and he covers Alabama football and men's basketball. Reach him at nkelly@gannett.com or follow him @_NickKelly on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Nate Oats: Alabama basketball, Missouri coaches discuss push
