Alabama Basketball’s Slow Starts Causing Strategic Turmoil in Recent Losses

The No. 4 Alabama men’s basketball team, at an incredibly inopportune time, has found itself on a bit of a late-season skid.

Facing down the toughest and most important part of its schedule, the Crimson Tide (21-5, 10-3 SEC) has now lost two consecutive games, at home against Auburn last weekend and at No. 15 Missouri (20-6, 9-4 SEC) on Wednesday night.

There have been plenty of issues across both games, but one common denominator? The deficit that Alabama started the game with ended up matching the margin it eventually lost by.

Against No. 1 Auburn, the visiting Tigers scored the first nine points of a contest Nate Oats’ team lost 94-85. Days later in Columbia, the Crimson Tide gave up the first 12 points of the game in unanswered fashion, and the final score was 110-98.

“They started out 12-zip, scored 18 before the first media [timeout],” Oats said. “Getting our guys ready to go is part of my job as a head coach, and I didn’t do a very good job of it tonight. We didn’t start the game out well.”

Oats said after the Auburn game that his squad talks about starts and ends to halves. Bruce Pearl’s Tigers closed the first half of that game on a pivotal 7-0 run. Alabama did score the last points of the first half on Wednesday, though it was still behind by double digits going into the locker room.

The fact that the numbers of the opening deficits reflect the exact margins of victory for the opposing teams may seem poetic. Countless coaches, countless times, have said that basketball is a game of runs; this statement is as foundational to the sport as any.

As true as that point is, though, a lot still happens between the opening tip, its subsequent moments and the end of a 40-minute game. The Crimson Tide, for example, ended up tying the Auburn game in the second half. At no point in either of its past two games has Alabama led. That factor also bears massive weight related to the outcomes.

“They’ve [Missouri] got a good team. They’ve been winning a lot of big games,” Oats said. “They were great, we weren’t very good.”

With only a small number of games remaining on a behemoth of a regular season schedule, Alabama has been hamstrung by the opposition storming the gates at the beginning of games. Correcting this trend could also pave the way toward resolution of some of the team’s other problems.

If it continues, however, that casts a pall over the Crimson Tide’s seeding prospects for March, as well as its immediate future in the competitively robust SEC.