The Alabama men’s basketball team, ranked No. 17 nationally, lost to Tennessee 79-73 on Saturday night at Coleman Coliseum. Despite leading 39-36 at halftime, Alabama was outscored by the Volunteers 43-34 in the second half.
Labaron Philon Jr. led Alabama with 26 points, seven assists, and four rebounds. Charles Bediako made his season debut and contributed 13 points, three rebounds, two steals, and two blocks. Latrell Wrightsell Jr., returning to the lineup, scored Alabama’s first six points and finished the first half with 11 points.
Tennessee’s Nate Ament scored a game-high 29 points while Ja’Kobi Gillespie added 24 points. Together they accounted for 53 of Tennessee’s total points.
Alabama head coach Nate Oats commented after the game: “Obviously not the outcome we were looking for, got to give Tennessee a ton of credit. They had a week off just like we did and they came ready to go. Defensively, we weren’t as good as I thought we needed to be in the first half, and we’ve had a major issue with second-half starts. A three-point lead (at halftime), I felt, should’ve been a lot bigger. We took care of a few things on the defensive end in the first half and then all of a sudden it disappeared immediately in the second half. They went from down three to up six pretty quickly. We need to find out how to have a lot better starts in the second half and we need to figure out how to make tougher plays. Tennessee is typically one of the toughest teams as far as physicality, effort, and rebounding, they are one of the tougher teams in the league.
Too many guys get their season highs on us; Nate Ament comes out and scores his season high on us. We obviously know he is a talented player, he is supposed to go in the lottery and we did not really have anybody step up and do a good job stopping him. Tennessee is a really good defensive team and we did not do a good job attacking them, in large parts to us not being able to get enough stops and get out in transition. We did not nearly have any transition buckets which is not how we are supposed to play. We have now lost back-to-back home games. We had a great crowd, I thought they were unbelievable. Thank them for coming out and giving us exactly what we needed but we did not give them a good enough show.
We need to get ready for Missouri, quick turnaround, we have them on Tuesday and they’re good. We need to focus on what we need to do to get better moving forward and we need to be a lot better than what we were tonight.”
Philon Jr.’s performance marked his sixth game this season scoring at least 25 points or more for Alabama. The Crimson Tide bench contributed 17 points compared with seven from Tennessee’s reserves.
Alabama forced ten turnovers that resulted in eleven points while Tennessee converted seven turnovers into seven points for themselves. However, Tennessee dominated rebounding with an overall advantage of 42-33 including outrebounding Alabama by eleven boards in the second half alone.
In terms of shooting efficiency during the first half both teams performed well: Alabama shot over fifty percent from the field while Tennessee was close behind at nearly forty-seven percent.
The Crimson Tide will next face Missouri at home on Tuesday with tipoff scheduled for 7:00 p.m Central Time on SEC Network.
