NEWARK, N.J. — Alabama coach Nate Oats spoke to reporters after the Crimson Tide’s 85-65 loss to Duke in the Elite Eight. Alabama finished the season with a 28-9 record.
Here’s everything Oats said.
Opening statement
“Yeah, obviously a tough night for us. Duke obviously had a big part to do with that. They're a great team. They've got great players. Coaching staff did a good job getting them ready. Only one team is going to end up cutting the nets down in San Antonio. It won't be us this year.
“I told our guys, we've raised this program to a level where the standard is really high. 99 percent of college basketball players would trade places with these guys with the year we had. But we're disappointed. We had bigger goals, and it's disappointing to go out like we went out.
“But I thought our guys stayed together. They kept playing hard. Duke was good. We didn't do a good job attacking their switching on defense. We shot 34%. We shot 35, they shot 54. It's hard to overcome that. You get out-rebounded 11-2.
“We had said coming into the off-season that if we have a tough shooting night — two years ago when we were the No. 1 overall seed, I think we shot 3 of 27 from three and lost. But we had gotten 20 O-boards. We've got to figure out ways to win when we don't shoot it well.
“The offensive rebounding was a big one we kind of said we need to be elite at, get to the free-throw line. We didn't do any well. We got to the free-throw line a fair amount, but it was not enough.
“The O-boards — yeah, they made more free throws than we shot, so we didn't get to the free-throw line enough. And the O-boards, we had 10, but they outscored us in second-chance points. We didn't really score off the O-boards. Grant was the only guy on our team with more than one O-board.
“We've got to get better. We obviously played two nights ago and it's tough within 48 hours from playing as well as we did to playing as poorly as we did. That's how the NCAA Tournament works in an one-game elimination tournament. You play poorly and you get sent home, and that's what happened.
“Duke is as good a team as we've seen all year. We've got some really good teams in the SEC, and they're at that level, and it wasn't meant to be for us tonight.”
On Duke’s strong defense
“Yeah, I mean, one is they've got length all over the place. You look at their starting lineup, they've got Khaman Maluach that has a 9'8 reach. He protects the rim at a high level. So the way we want to play — it's been top 5 offense in the country, we've led the country in scoring the last [few seasons].
“But when they've got a rim protector, it's hard to get rim shoots. At the rim we shot 48%, ...
