TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The No. 4/5 Alabama men’s basketball team continued its winning ways as it defeated Memphis, 91-88, inside Coleman Coliseum on Tuesday night. With the win, the Crimson Tide improves to 9-1 on the season, which is the program’s best start since the 2006-07 campaign.
Freshman Brandon Miller scored 21 of his team-leading 24 total points in the second half to lead four UA players in double digits. Mark Sears finished with 18 points to go along with a team-leading two steals, while Noah Clowney had 11 points and Jaden Bradley finished with 10 on the night.
Memphis (8-3) was led by Kendric Davis, who finished with 30 points to lead all scorers. DeAndre Williams added 15 points in the losing effort.
Head Coach Nate Oats Postgame Comments
"As far as tonight's game, this is a better Memphis team than last year's team, in my opinion. Penny (Hardaway) has done a really good job getting an older group and their veterans ready. Did you see how many seniors they played? One point during the second half for a while, we had four freshmen on the floor. We had various points we could have pulled away, and I thought we should have pulled away, and just couldn't get the stops we needed to. You have to give Memphis a ton of credit for hanging in there. They could have gone away when we were up nine and trying to push it to ten, but we just could never put them away. We didn't play great on offense for a large stretch of the game. Our defense was good to start, and then our defense kind of fell apart in the second half. But without class right now, I thought our student section was great. The crowd got super loud when we needed stops, sometimes we didn't get them, but I enjoyed the crowd's energy. In our defense, we gave up to many twos, but we did a decent job from three. They didn't hit a three until 0.4 seconds to go, so we did a decent job guarding the three-point line. Our free throw shooting was not good, obviously. I think we were 8-for-14 at some point, and we missed out first one at the start of the half. I told the guys, when you're locked in, you're locked in, and we've just got to get locked in earlier.
Last year we had two big wins with Gonzaga and Houston, then went to Memphis and lost and really played super lethargic. This was not one of our better performances tonight, but it's still good to come out with a win. You've got to give the guys a...
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