Alabama Basketball's Jordan Bruner Poised for Immediate Impact with Nate Oats

The First-Team All-Ivy League forward has adapted well to Oats' fast style of play

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — When it comes to new big guys on the court this year, Alabama basketball has a lot going for it in grad-transfer forward Jordan Bruner.

Standing at 6-10 and weighing in a 225 pounds, the transfer from Yale has clearly made an immediate impact on coach Nate Oats’ squad during summer workouts and preseason practices.

Last Thursday, Oats couldn’t say enough about Bruner and his skills both on and off the court.

“Off the court he’s got a real high IQ and I think he’s got good leadership skills where he speaks up,” Oats said. “I think him coming in has really helped. [John] Petty and Herb [Jones] have been here, they’ve tried to step up as leaders on the team. I think he’s helped those guys in that regard. He speaks up, now they can speak up. There are multiple guys speaking up so I think he’s a really good leader. High IQ guy. Knows what we’re trying to get done.

“On the floor I think his passing ability is on another level. I think he can really make guys around him really good and he’s shooting it way better than I knew. I think he shot 32 percent at Yale — something like low 30s from what I remember. He’s one of the best shooters on the team right now. When he gets his feet set he’s not missing very many shots. When you put Reese and him — two bigs —they can both make threes as the level that they can and it makes it a lot harder for defense to come out and cover that.”

As a senior at Yale, Bruner earned both First Team All-Ivy League and Academic All-Ivy League honors. He was the first and only player in Yale basketball history to earn a triple-double, and his prowess made him one of the most sought-after transfer players in the country.

According to Oats, Bruner’s commitment to the Crimson Tide was worth celebrating.

“We put a lot of work into that one,” Oats said. “That was a lot of Zooms, FaceTimes, phone calls. That was the one we went after really hard just because the way we wanted to play.”

So why did Bruner pick Alabama when so many schools were also actively recruiting him? For starters, Bruner said that Oats’ knowledge of his play style and the amount of research he knew about him before they even formally met for the first time was impressive.

Before recruiting Bruner, Oats and his staff sat down and watched hours of film from Bruner at Yale, analyzing his play style and seeing how it could fit into their system.

“[Oats] did his research,” Bruner said. “He had seen a lot of film on me. He knew how I played. He had watched a lot of my games and a lot of the coaches, they called me and didn’t have as much of a good feel of the things I could do and how I could fit in their system so it was kind of vague and the detail he felt like I would do in his system was more appealing to me than most other schools.”

Bruner broke down his own film and laid out what Oats found most impressive about the grad-student forward.

“He saw the fact that I had a lot more range with my three-ball than most people I saw,” Bruner said. “There was a lot more consistency. The reason I shot it well [is] more of a rhythm thing based on my numbers you know as well as handling the ball, pushing it on the break, passing — he had seen a lot of my passing clips — so that was the most thing. He had seen a lot of the plays I could make handling the ball and shooting it off the ball as well as athletic and defense-like things so I think the most impressive thing was just you know I could tell how much film he had seen.

“I just tried to sit back and look at different systems, different rosters who I felt like my style of play would fit in the best. It was really about rosters and where I could fit in.”

Alabama basketball returns just four starters from last year, plus three players that didn’t see action on the court due to injuries or waiver issues. For the Crimson Tide, developing chemistry this offseason has been important with so many new players on the roster.

While it might be more difficult to bond during workouts and on the floor due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Bruner says that he feels good about the team and the bonds they’ve formed in just the past few months.

“It’s been great,” Bruner said. “I wasn’t here last year to see what it was like last year but you can’t even really tell that we have a bunch of new guys in my opinion. We got all the news guys that weren’t here last year are learning really quick and they’re picking up new things — including myself. They’re getting better every week. And we got the guys who didn’t play last year, they’re getting healthy and showing us all what they can do and they’re helping us as newcomers as well so it doesn’t even look like a new group to us. I think we’re going to be a lot better than they were last year and I think we got a chance to be special.”

With an entirely new system under Oats, Bruner has had to adjust a lot this past offseason. Oats has always had a fast style of play, coaching Alabama last season to one of the fastest-scoring teams in the country. On fast breaks, the Crimson Tide outpaced most teams in the SEC, a feat that was quite impressive for Oats to have only been with the team one year.

That being said, Bruner believes he and his new teammates are getting acclimated to Oats style and are improving every day.

“I think we’re getting better every day,” Bruner said. “I can’t really tell you on a scale of one to 10 how good we are or anything like that but I think we’re gonna continue to get better every day of the season. We’re all learning. Like I said, this is a new system for all of us so we’re getting all the time but one of the things is we’re not really taking any steps backwards so I think we’ll be fine.”