Destin, Florida - Alabama men's basketball coach Nate Oats talks transfers and culture.
Here is the transcript from Wednesday
Regarding NCAA Transfers
I think you just got to be aware of the fact that guys have the ability to leave more and more and they've got more people in their ear that is telling them to leave as soon as there's an adverse situation. So I think you have to build into them and teach them and build their character. Look, life, in general, you're going to have adversity hit you if every time you have adversity hit you-you run from it, we're not really helping you grow as men. So you're teaching it's coming.
It's going to come during the year and I think you see that with some of the kids that left us, we weren't their first school. So I mean, some guys are going to go now play for their third and fourth coach. So at some point, you can't run from adversity every single time there's some adversity in your life.
On the culture and returning players for this season
I mean a lot of the culture of the program comes with how you're running on a day to day basis. Now how we want to play, getting more guards we'd like to play faster. Getting the guys that are more suited to playing that way. We need to get more shooting and we like to play with the floor spread a lot more and spread your guys out as far as you want, but if they can't shoot the defense is spread out with them so it doesn't do you any good. We added Beetle Bolden who can really shoot.
We've gotten some athletes that can run a little bit, James Rojas is a really skilled four that can kind of be multi-dimensional. He's a tough kid. I think we need a little bit toughness and he's a winner so we added some pieces. But again part of it too is just teaching these guys how we want to play. We had three weeks and I thought we got a great head start in three weeks. And we're gonna get eight weeks in the summer we'll get eight more weeks to really start to build in how we want to play and our pace and our style and they had some really good pieces here for how we want to play.
I mean Herb Jones in transition is as good as any wing you're going to see when you get him going in transition fours open and spread. Kira Lewis is one of the fastest point guards in the country, John Petty can really shoot and we need shooting to space the floor. We like to space Alex Reese as a big that can space the floor shoot. Everybody looks our offensive numbers at Buffalo and they were really good, we were top five in the country scoring each the last two years, but a lot of why we won, was just our toughness our defense.
I think we finished 31st in defensive efficiency. So we were in the top 30 in offense and on defense. Galen Smith is a tough kid that plays hard and rebounds he can't guard rebound you're never gonna get out in transition so we've got guys that fit how we want to play we just need to teach him how we want to play a little bit more so we've got plenty of time and do that we're in the process of doing that right now
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