To say that Alabama basketball hasn’t taken a step forward under Avery Johnson would be, well, fake news.
As Johnson mentioned on Monday’s SEC coaches teleconference, the Crimson Tide were the No. 10 seed entering last year’s SEC tournament. This year, Alabama secured a bye and will enter as the No. 5 seed.
I’m not great at math, but that looks like progress.
While most people will point to next year as the year that Johnson’s team could take a massive step forward on the national level, finishing fifth in the SEC isn’t all that bad. Alabama won double-digit SEC games for the first time since the 2013-14 season.
However, regular season success against potential opponents is no longer on the mind of Johnson and company.
“It really doesn’t matter what kind of success you had against them in the regular season,” Johnson said. “Everyone is 0-0 going into the tournament.”
“We’re never gonna be overconfident and take any team for granted. We don’t have that type of team. We have to prepare well and be in the right mindset to execute to have success.”
The Crimson Tide will play either No. 12 Mississippi State or No. 13 LSU in Thursday’s second round game. They swept both teams during the regular season, and will attempt to beat one for a third time to score a rematch with South Carolina on Friday.
The two teams played perhaps the game of the year in the conference back in early February, with Alabama winning 90-86 in a four overtime thriller in Columbia.
But to make a deep run this week in Nashville, Johnson knows that his team will need to keep striving for balance.
“We just have to do a good job of taking care of the ball, rebounding the ball, and trying to become a better balanced team which we’ve been searching for all year,” he said. “We’ve put together some good halves, but we haven’t put together as many good complete games as I wanted to.
The most obvious case of Alabama’s inability to put two full halves together on a regular basis this year came in the regular season finale at Tennessee. The Crimson Tide got out to a hot start and led for much of the game, but the Vols were able to erase a 16-point deficit to earn a much-needed win.
Luckily for Alabama, the SEC tournament allows it to start from scratch and forget the pain of another head-scratching half.
“We’ve already hit the reset button,” Johnson said. “We’ve shown throughout the course of conference play that we can play some really good halves on defense and some really good halves on offense, then we’ll have an outlier performance where we play well on both ends of the floor for 30-34 minutes of a game.
“We know we’re capable, we just gotta make sure we play to our strengths and understand the cycles of a game. We feel we’re as competitive on the defensive end of the court as any team in our conference, it’s just a matter of us generating enough offense to be competitive.”
One player that has found a lot of success this season on the offensive end of the floor is freshman Braxton Key, who was named to the league’s All-Freshman Team on Tuesday. Key led the team in scoring with 12.3 points per game and contributed 5.7 rebounds per game.
Key and fellow freshman Dazon Ingram (10.3 PPG) will need to be at their best offensively this week for the Crimson Tide to win multiple games.
And despite being on the side of the bracket with Kentucky and South Carolina, Alabama can certainly win several games due to the unpredictable nature of the SEC this season.
That’s a theme that Johnson echoed when asked about how wide open this tournament is heading into the two first round games on Wednesday.
“Nobody went undefeated in our conference, right?” he said. “So we aren’t looking at a team that’s 34-0 or anything like that.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody wins the SEC tournament that’s not in the top four in terms of seeding because we’ve had a lot of teams win games on the road. It makes for an exciting SEC season, and we’re gonna have some great games.”