TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Alabama basketball ran an 11-man rotation during the Crimson Tide’s 97-90 win over North Dakota. It was the 11th straight game coach Nate Oats used all of his available scholarship players this season.

The Tide’s depth isn’t a surprise. Alabama reloaded after its Final Four run with one of the best rosters in the country and most if not all of those players have lived up to their projected impact. Labaron Philon and Clifford Omoruyi have emerged as starters. Derrion Reid has made an instant impact and Chris Youngblood and Houston Mallette have earned more minutes since making their debuts earlier this month.

With two games to go until the start of SEC play, Oats will have some key decisions to make. He made it clear he does not want to run an 11-man rotation during SEC play and will have to solidify a starting five and determine which players will see the most action off the bench moving forward.

Oats appears to have found his top four guys. He told reporters Friday that the analytics that Alabama so heavily depends on shows the four-man group of Mark Sears, Philon, Grant Nelson and Omoruyi have the best numbers on both sides of the ball. But the best fit alongside those four remains up in the air due in large part to Alabama’s mixing and matching of lineups thus far.

“I don’t know exactly what the best five-person lineup [is],” Oats said. “We don’t have a ton of reps. Different guys have been in — Derrion, Jarin, whether we go with the guards. We had [Latrell Wrightsell Jr.] in there for a while, he’s out for the year. Houston doesn’t have very many reps in there. So the sample sizes on some of those five-person lineups isn’t huge, but I do know that the one four-person lineup is pretty strong on both sides of the ball. So we’ve gotta continue to get those four playing harder, better, but kind of figure out who maybe that fifth guy in there.”

Wrightsell’s absence hasn’t helped Alabama’s quest to find its fifth starter. He solidified the role, starting five straight games before his season-ending Achilles injury. Reid and Jarin Stevenson have been the go-to options with the latter filling Wrightsell’s spot since his injury. Ried has started three games this season, while Stevenson has had the most starts outside of the group of the main group of four with seven.

“Jarin Stevenson, who we’ve been putting in the starting lineup has got a really high defensive leverage himself,” Oats said. “He hasn’t shot the ball through the course of the season like he’s capable of. These last few games he has, he’s 7 of 9 from 3 over the course of a tough couple games. So, he’s been up there on the defensive side.”

Along with the pair of forwards, Oats has plenty of other options, including Mallette and Youngblood. Both players give Oats the option of a three-guard lineup, which he’s used in the past and did so when Wrightsell was starting alongside Philon and Sears.

While finding a surefire fifth starter will be key, Oats also stressed that arguably the more important decision isn’t who begins the game, but who ends it. Many of the usual starters have been games late for Alabama, but Oats has also liked what he’s seen from others in crunch time. Against North Dakota, Mallette, Youngblood, Aden Holloway and Mouhamed Dioubate all made appearances in the final two minutes.

With a strong four-man lineup and plenty of players vying to keep playing big minutes, Oats has a good problem on his hands. He’ll few more data points from Alabama’s penultimate non-conference game against Kent State at noon CT Sunday inside Coleman Coliseum. With big lineup decisions coming, Oats is, as usual, trusting the numbers and even relying on some outside help to solidify Alabama’s best rotations as it looks to contend an a deeply talented SEC.

“We’ve got all the data,” Oats said. “We’ll probably take a hard look at it right after all the non-conference games are done, but we’ll take a peak at it and kind of get some feedback from our analytics company that we’ll use a little bit too.”