Alabama coach, who once said Calipari was ‘whining,’ says UK coach is an inspiration
Alabama’s first-year coach, Nate Oats, has shown that it’s possible to impulsively say John Calipari is a whiner while also being a longtime admirer of the Kentucky coach.
Saturday’s UK-Alabama game will mark the first time that Oats has matched basketball wits with Calipari since the 2018 NCAA Tournament. That was in Boise, Idaho, when Oats’ Buffalo team played Kentucky.
Before the second-round game, a reporter asked Oats about his Buffalo team playing UK.
“Calipari’s been whining about no experience — young, young, young,” Oats said. “Well, we don’t have that problem. We got some veteran guys.”
When asked this week about that comment, Oats laughed.
“That was dumb,” he said. “That was a bad mistake.”
Oats said he apologized to Calipari at the first opportunity. The UK coach accepted the apology.
Oats, who was a high school math teacher and coach in Romulus, Mich., as recently as 2013, said something another high school coach told him going into that NCAA Tournament prompted the comment about whining. The coaching colleague sent Oats a text encouraging him to beat Arizona in the first round, which Buffalo did by a score of 89-68, and then beat Calipari, who the author of the text wrote had been whining about UK’s youth and inexperience.
“It stuck in my mind,” Oats said of the text. It came out when asked at a news conference about his team playing Kentucky.
“As soon as I said it, I knew it was stupid,” Oats said. “The Big Blue Nation, I’m sure they’ll be all over me this time, too.”
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Oats is a longtime admirer of Calipari. Alabama’s fast-paced offense, which has produced 90-plus points in each of the last five games (which is a program record), can be linked to Calipari’s signature dribble-drive attack.
A tournament loss for Romulus High School prompted Oats to want his teams to play faster. As he recalled, a rival beat his 48-35.
“That was disgustingly terrible,” Oats said. “Not fun to watch. Not fun to coach. Nothing fun about it.”
The loss prompted Oats to dive deep into player development. He led a fundraising campaign that resulted in the school ultimately buying six shooting machines. Players shot more. Players got better.
“That’s kind of where I made my name with all the skill development,” Oats said. “My next thought was we’re going to spend all this time in the gym with shooters and skill players. Don’t turn them into robots. Once you get to the games, let them do what you worked on.”
Alabama is reaping the benefit this season. Through games on Wednesday, the Tide ranked fourth nationally in scoring (84.4 points per game). Each of Oats’ Buffalo teams the last two seasons ranked sixth nationally in scoring: 84.4 points in 2018-19 and 84.6 points in 2017-18.
To help foster the move to faster-paced basketball for Romulus High School, Oats would visit NBA camps and/or colleges. One trip took him to Memphis to watch the Grizzlies at a time when Calipari was the Memphis Tigers’ coach.
Oats got acquainted with Vance Walberg, who Calipari cites as his mentor in adopting the dribble-drive approach to offense. After studying the dribble-drive, Oats became a devotee. He studied how teams coached by Walberg and Calipari used the dribble-drive.
While noting that NBA teams increasingly play at a faster pace, Oats said that the college game might trend to slower offense.
“People copycat what works,” he said. “Virginia won the (2019) championship, and plays as slow as anybody in the country. Maybe I’m doing it the wrong way.
“It’s the way I know how to do it, so that’s what we’re doing.”
Alabama’s next challenge will be to score against a Kentucky defense that ranks among the top 50 nationally in points allowed (No. 44 at 62.2 points per game) and opponents’ shooting accuracy (No. 37 at 38.7 percent) through games on Wednesday.
“I’m way more worried about figuring out how to score against them than (about) getting stops,” Oats said.
Defending Kentucky will be difficult, too, the Alabama coach said. But getting back on defense to limit UK fast breaks, and also rebounding to limit second-chance opportunities makes defending a less complicated problem to solve.
But Kentucky’s defense, which has three willing defenders on the perimeter (Ashton Hagans, Tyrese Maxey and Immanuel Quickley), plus rim protection from Nick Richards, is much more of a head-scratcher.
“I don’t have that figured out,” Oats said. “I have a lot of film study to do.”
