The story before the game was the return of Charles Bediako. The story during the game was Nate Ament.
Ament, a 6’10” freshman from Manassas, Va., torched the Crimson Tide for a career-high 29 points as Tennessee (13-6, 3-3 SEC) walked away with a 79-73 victory at Coleman Coliseum in Tuscaloosa on Saturday.
Ja’Kobi Gillespie added 24 points and 4 assists for the Vols.
It was Tennessee’s fifth straight win over the Crimson Tide, who has dropped the last two games at Coleman Coliseum.
After the game, Alabama head coach Nate Oats once again lamented his team’s inability to stop the opponent’s most prolific player.
“Too many guys get their season highs on us; Nate Ament comes out and scores his season high on us. We obviously know he is a talented player, he is supposed to go in the lottery and we did not really have anybody step up and do a good job stopping him,” said Oats.
Early on, though, Alabama looked as though it was going to turn in its most impressive defensive performance of the season, holding the Vols to only 12 points with 9:13 left in the first half. But the Tide could not hold on, as Tennessee slowly chiseled the lead away, courtesy of offensive artists Ament and Gillespie.
Bediako, who returned to Alabama after spending three years in the NBA’s G League, sparked Alabama with an early dunk and Latrell Wrightsell Jr. scored 11 early points to help the Tide push out to a 10-point lead. But a 7-0 Tennesssee run, punctuated by a Gillespie three-pointer, helped the Vols climb within 3 at 22-19.
Two consecutive alley-oop dunks by Bediako sent the Coleman crowd into a frenzy, but Tennessee held steady throughout the balance of the first half with Ament and the gritty play of Gillespie, who scored the last 5 points of the half on a pair of driving layups and a make at the charity stripe.
Both offenses were efficient in the first half, as the Crimson Tide shot 51.7 percent from the field (15-29) while Tennessee was 14-for-30, good for 46.7 percent.
Alabama (13-6, 3-3 SEC) took a 39-36 lead at the break, but the Vols used a 9-2 run to start the second half to stretch out to a 47-41 lead. A pair of threes by Alabama’s Taylor Bol Bowen and Wrightsell Jr. helped the Tide to pull even at 50, and punch and counter punch defined a large portion of the second half, as the game saw a total of 7 ties.
But in the end, it was simply too much Ament and Gillespie and too little Alabama offense.
Ament scored 18 second half points and Gillespie 14, while the Crimson Tide shot only 34 percent from the floor and a paltry 21 percent (4-for-19) from behind the arc. The Tide scored just three points in the final 5:10 of the game and did not make a field goal in the final 3:11 of the game.
Alabama, without the services of Aden Holloway (17.7 ppg) and Amari Allen (11.7 ppg), used its length to dominate the paint on both sides of the floor in the first half. At one point, Oats went with a lineup of Aiden Sherell (6’11”), Bol Bowen (6’10”) and Bediako (7’0”) and relied on the three only 7 times in the first half. In the second half, however, Tennessee limited the big three to only 14 total points while cutting off Alabama’s fast-break game and neutralizing the Tide’s three-point effectiveness.
“A three-point lead (at halftime), I felt, should’ve been a lot bigger. We took care of a few things on the defensive end in the first half and then all of a sudden it disappeared immediately in the second half. They went from down three to up six pretty quickly. We need to find out how to have a lot better starts in the second half and we need to figure out how to make tougher plays,” Oats said. “Tennessee is a really good defensive team and we did not do a good job attacking them, in large parts to us not being able to get enough stops and get out in transition. We did not nearly have any transition buckets which is not how we are supposed to play.”
Overall, Tennessee won the rebounding battle against the Tide 42-33, including a 27-16 edge in the second half.
Labaron Philon Jr. led the Tide with 26 points, while Wrightsell Jr. chipped in 14 and Bediako added 13.
Alabama hopes to get its first home win since January 3 on Tuesday in a matchup against Missouri. TG
