Alabama Basketball: How the Crimson Tide's Innovation Continues to Roll

Alabama looks to continue an upward trajectory in college basketball, and the details of its innovative system define the approach to its most important offseason in years.

Alabama Athletics

Not unlike its neighbors on the corner lot of Coliseum Boulevard in the Mal M. Moore Athletic Complex, Alabama basketball has similar decrees to defy as its season soon begins after sweeping SEC titles, revising record books, and losing assertive veterans who led the team in 2020-21 to as quick an ascension as the sport's seen.

The obvious disconnect to Alabama football is that third-year coach Nate Oats doesn’t yet have the equity to warrant fans’ response of ‘But, but it’s Alabama’ when many in and around college basketball naturally will question where and when Crimson Tide hoops nears its proverbial plateau.

But everything in basketball can be quantified, to the good and bad of Alabama skeptics, as once-empirical evidence presented by the ‘eye test’ has conceded to data and analytically-driven scouting thanks to hoops’ hand-me-down approach to growing the game through information gathering first by the NBA.

It’s different now, and Alabama illustrates the sport's evolution in its play with a high number of attempted three-point shots, the sole alternative to shots at the rim per analytics, a fast speed of play, and its have-cake-and-eat-it-too outlook on quantity and quality being all but mutually exclusive in games won.

The amount of shots dictates scoring opportunities just as the quality of shot determines the likelihood of ball stripping nylon.

Under Oats, the Tide is the cat to copy, and nothing illuminates that claim more than a now-growing title in college basketball that's everything but for the Alabama coach, the role of a number-cruncher and a covert staffer who values the values.

Meet Adam Bauman, the Director of Scouting and Analytics for Alabama basketball. He's the assistant unseen, even to top-notch cameramen, and his input to the Tide's innovation, whether in recruiting, scouting of opponents, or trend-spotting outliers in the team's performance via data, is all part of a job description recently growing in popularity.

It's just that his boss spotted the sport's direction before most else.

He's another pair of eyes as receptive to the role numbers play in the game as Oats, the high school math teacher-turned-SEC Coach of the Year. And he's been with him since he was at Buffalo, after he served as a manager to the Southern Illinois basketball program and spent time as a graduate assistant at multiple stops following graduation from SIU.

Bauman enters year three at Alabama, and he's paid his dues of rebuilding the program internally as others have. And he's witnessed its rapid growth from year one to year two under its aggressive leader. Yet, as accomplished as the Tide was last season, its perception of being offensively-driven is a half-truth.

"When you look at the analytics and you look at the numbers, the difference was we went from being out of the top 100 defensively to being in the top five for the most part of the season," Bauman said. "And then the second part of the year we were top-three, so that was obviously the biggest difference."

It's a multi-varied insight to why Alabama largely improved defensively from 2019-20 to 2020-21, and here are the numbers: Two years ago, its defensive efficiency rating was 99.5, which ranked 114th nationally. Last season its rating finished at 87.8, ranking third-best in college basketball, per KenPom.

It's personnel, personnel, and, yes, personnel. Oats and Co. ably equalized offenses by trotting out longer, more athletic players who were better at smothering ball screens, close outs, and other actions that defensively hamstrung the team the year prior due to less size and coverage.

Subsequently, the Crimson Tide won both the regular season and tournament championship of its conference, returned to the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2003-04, had an NBA Lottery pick for the second consecutive season in guard Joshua Primo, and still its two-year transition from a first round NIT exit to a trendy Final Four pick among Tournament experts is questioned in that its sustainability invites general reluctance.

Nowadays, and leading up to early autumn, the coach-speak cliché of not dwelling on past performances, poor and otherwise, doesn't apply to those within the walls of Coleman Coliseum, the home arena of Alabama basketball.

Bauman, Oats, and others all binged basketball all offseason to spot potential improvements, past errors, and reasons why the Tide exited in the third round of the NCAA Tournament in its loss to UCLA, a national semifinalist thereafter.

Though the Bruins weren't a singular focus so much as an overall representation of a barrier to splinter. 

"We did some deep dives into what went wrong offensively. Well, not necessarily what went wrong, but why we dipped," Bauman said. "At the surface level, just looking at the stats and where we ranked in certain areas, we got our shot blocked a lot and then our turnover rate ended up being pretty bad on the year."

'Bama ranked 157th in the NCAA with a turnover rate of 18.6 percent of its possessions, and in its seven losses it shot 44 percent on two-point field goal attempts compared to the season average of over 50 percent. 

Factor in the Crimson Tide's high number of attempted three-point shots—totaling over 46 percent of its shots taken, ranking 18th nationally—and you'd figure many of those two-point field goals were at or near the rim in its losses last season.

Bauman attributes its struggles at the rim to either poor reads or indecisiveness, saying Alabama players needed more two-footed plants down low to read the defense, find an open man, or set up a better scoring opportunity.

Meanwhile ...

What adjustments were made, you wonder, well, the Crimson Tide indirectly consulted with one of the few consistent contenders of college basketball, Gonzaga, to improve its own program from a distance.

See, under coach Mark Few, the Zags are most similar to Alabama upon surface-level digging, and the one-loss national runner-up was the sole team alongside Oats' crew to both finish with its possessions per 40 minutes mark north of 73 and to finish in the Top 25 of the final AP Poll.

Gonzaga ranked seventh nationally and Alabama finished 11th.

"There was a time when we basically went through every possession of Gonzaga’s this year," Bauman said. "The biggest difference between Gonzaga and us is they have way more player movement. They’re always slashing guys, and swing-swing and moving, and that’s how they get more assisted shots at the rim."

“But we’ve also taken some stuff they do and we’ve talked about it, about instituting more player movement."

The Tide's video coordinator Derek Rongstad was one of the main staffers behind the deep dive of Gonzaga, Bauman said, and retrospective analysis played a role in how the offense will be tweaked from last season to this year. 

There's a balance, though, given how Alabama likes to operate. 

In its system, if you'd even define it as such with the amount of player freedom it emphasizes, there are less chess pieces moving at once, but the ones who're moved around the metaphorical board are more consequential to the success of the on-court collective.

And the Crimson Tide offense can't stray too far from that. It ties back to turnovers, particularly when you consider that Alabama's offense is built on player reads rather than sets, plays, or anything to skew the right mix of liberal ball movement and drive-then-kick out chances.

But all this makes for a leap from prep basketball to high-level SEC play, and prospects who pique the interest of Crimson Tide coaches usually share similar traits. For Oats and his staff, their recruiting philosophy hasn't changed much, either.

"Positional size is huge, length is huge, athleticism is huge, and they have to be able to shoot the ball," Bauman said. "If they can shoot it, and they're long and athletic then we can kind of take care of the rest."

The average height of players on the Alabama roster last season was a shade under 6-foot-5 at 77.7 inches, and while the colloquialism of "big man beats little man" is largely true in basketball, the game now champions variables like wingspan and lateral athleticism as it's moved to a more guard and wing-heavy playstyle with players who're, ideally, capable of filling almost every role on the floor. 

To phrase it differently, the sport of college basketball may have been behind the times of Oats and his staff since he was at Buffalo, and everyone is catching on in terms of roster construction, player development, and improvements internally.

And as innovative as the Crimson Tide has been since Oats' arrival, as well as Bauman and a number of other assistants, the once-clear advantage of zigging to the zag at a mid-major program like Buffalo has diminished.

What's left is a staff built by the work of Bauman and others who's willing to acknowledge what needs to change, and as a result, won't likely sit still regardless of how many more trophies accumulate in Coleman Coliseum.

"Someone's outworking you, someone's doing something to set themselves apart, and a lot of us are aligned in that thinking, but it all starts with Nate."

As for that plateau ...