Alabama basketball season is upon us. As part of its tune-up for its regular season opening on November 4th against UNC Asheville, the Crimson Tide will play two charity exhibition games. The first is tonight against Wake Forest in Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham. The next is on Monday the 28th in Huntsville against Memphis.
If you can’t make the trek to Birmingham to watch Alabama play in person, the game will be streamed live on YouTube on the Hibbet Sports channel starting at 7pm CST.
Alabama has a loaded roster heading into the season with the highest expectations in school history. Fresh off of the first Final Four in program history, Tide hoops fans are thirsty for more. The team enters the season with its highest ever preseason ranking, coming in at No. 2 in the AP Poll behind the Kansas Jayhawks.
What should you expect from the Crimson Tide tonight in the exhibition game?
Three Alabama players will not play
Chris Youngblood suffered an ankle injury in practice a few weeks ago that will keep him out for at least the first month of the season, so he is obviously out tonight.
Along with Youngblood, graduate senior Latrell Wrightsell and true freshman Aiden Sherrell will both miss the game with minor injuries. That leaves the Crimson Tide with 10 scholarship players, all of which will see a good chunk of playing time.
What will Alabama’s rotation look like?
In a word: experimental. Nate Oats has always treated exhibition games like an extension of practice. That will be true in tonight’s contest as well and is not in any way indicative of what the rotations will look like when the Crimson Tide starts playing games that matter.
When Alabama is fully healthy, I expect the starting five to be all graduate seniors: Mark Sears, Latrell Wrightsell, Chris Youngblood, Grant Nelson, and Clifford Omoruyi. That starting five gives Alabama perhaps the most experienced starting five in the country, and also gives you three guys who shot north of 40% from three last season in Sears, Wrightsell, and Youngblood, and a fourth – Grant Nelson – who can get hot from deep.
It’s a dynamic shooting backcourt and a frontcourt with great length and shot blocking prowess.
Two of those projected starters are out tonight, so it’ll be interesting to see where Alabama turns. I would expect either sophomore Aden Holloway or true freshman Labaron Philon to start next to Sears in the backcourt.
Holloway gives you more of a shooting presence and could run the point with Sears sliding to the two-guard spot, which he played a lot of in his first season with the Crimson Tide. Philon, however, gives Alabama a better defensive lineup, though not the threat as a three-point shooter that Holloway is.
In Youngblood’s spot, I think there’s three different players who Oats will consider in the starting role. When the regular season starts and Wrightsell is back, Alabama could decide to start three guards and throw Philon with Sears and Wrightsell. Obviously, that’s not an option this evening.
Instead, freshman Derrion Reid is probably the most likely to slide into that starting role. The one area of concern with starting Reid and Philon, though, is the Tide’s three-point shooting takes a big hit with Sears becoming the only real threat from deep.
That’s why it wouldn’t surprise me to see Pepperdine transfer Houston Mallette in the starting lneup. He shot 41% from three last season, and it could be a confidence booster for a kid who committed to a much different roster back in March and enters the season with a much more uncertain role than he originally figured.
We’ve also heard rumblings of a giant Tide lineup, so don’t be surprised to see Jarin Stevenson either start at the three, or see some extended playing time next to Nelson and Omoruyi to see if that lineup can work or not.
It’s all about experimenting here and seeing what works and – more importantly – what really doesn’t.
Take the stats and a result with a grain of salt
Like I said above, Oats will treat this game like practice, meaning he’ll throw some crazy lineup combinations out there that we might never see again. It could lead to disastorous results. The Alabama team from a couple of years ago that went to the NCAA Tournament as the No.1 overall seed got blown out in an exhibtion by a TCU team that didn’t even make the tournament that year.
It’s basketball. Things happen. Things especially happen when you are throwing stuff against the wall just to see what sticks.
The interesting things to watch tonight will be how some players mesh together; that’s what the coaching staff will be looking at. Which players play well with each other? Which lineups are most effective?
This kind of setting can provide one-off scenarios, too. Sam Walters had a huge game in an exhibition last year scoring over 30-points and that meant very little to what he did in the real season. So if Derrion Reid goes out and scores 30, don’t annoit him the No. 1 pick in the 2025 draft (I’m mainly talking to myself, here.)
At the same time, if Labaron Philon goes 0/8 from the floor and turns it over seven times, he’s not immediately a bust, either.
Say hello to our old friend Davin Cosby
Davin Cosby will make his return to Alabama tonight. He transferred in the offseason to Wake Forest. I don’t know if it has officially been released, but I would expect the team to present him with his Final Four ring either before or after the game, which will be a neat moment.
