Crimson Tide basketball buckled up, future hitched to Avery Johnson
Alabama basketball head coach Avery Johnson coaches the Crimson Tide. (Robert Sutton/UA Athletics)
The Alabama basketball program begins SEC conference play on Thursday, Jan. 7 when the Crimson Tide visits Ole Miss.
After their most recent 67-59 overtime win against Jacksonville State and the 68-49 victory over Norfolk State, head coach Avery Johnson’s squad was able to add a little distance to a tough 72-68 loss to Oregon and push this season’s record to 9-3.
No one is expecting the Crimson Tide to be a Final Four team immediately and everyone knows that they will be a work in progress for the next couple of years. But the optimism at Coleman Coliseum is palpable. When Johnson made his coaching debut against Kennesaw State (after an exhibition against Trevecca Nazarene), the largest crowd to witness an Alabama season opener since 1989 – an announced attendance of 14,970 – noisily showed up to witness the team’s new up-tempo attack.
Johnson’s pre-season warning for Crimson Tide fans to “buckle up” is proving to have been more than cheerleading.
A sign of the team’s hunger and the positive things to come is a 5-1 record in games decided by fewer than 10 points. The conference as a whole seems to be making a greater commitment to enhancing its stature in basketball, as evidenced by more than just Kentucky’s annual influx of elite recruits.
When future No. 1 overall NBA draft pick Ben Simmons and highly ranked point guard Antonio Blakeney chose LSU, and when Mississippi State bagged the talented scorer Malik Newman, that signaled that the SEC is trending upwards. In addition to Alabama’s hiring of Johnson, which made a huge splash nationally, the conference was also strengthened by an influx of highly regarded coaches like Ben Howland at Mississippi State and Rick Barnes at Tennessee.
For folks who continue to think that the SEC is simply a football entity, they’ll be surprised by the depth on display when conference hoops play begins. Kentucky remains super-talented in spite of losing seven players early to the NBA, and coach Kevin Stallings has an exceptional talent in Damian Jones at Vanderbilt.
Texas A&M is good enough to get back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in five years and despite LSU’s early season struggles, Simmons is worth putting some time aside to watch the Tigers play. Frank Martin has quietly increased South Carolina’s win total in each of his three seasons and his current squad is ranked in the Top 25.
Alabama won’t be a tournament team overnight and Johnson didn’t inherit much on his arrival. But other schools will begin to feel the pressure of Johnson’s recruiting prowess, as evidenced by his surprising signing of five-star wing man Terrance Ferguson, a top-flight shooter with deep range whose athleticism is NBA-level.
That type of success on the recruiting trail in such a short time has folks excited about the future of the hoops program in Tuscaloosa. Ferguson was only one of four rising high school seniors this summer to play for Team USA in the FIBA U19 World Championships this summer.
Johnson overhauled the Crimson Tide roster this summer and the team has only six players returning from last year. This year is considered a rebuilding project, but next year’s team, if Johnson can continue to attract players of Ferguson’s caliber, will be a Top 20 squad at some point.
Johnson took the Dallas Mavericks to the NBA Finals in 2006 and with his infectious energy, enthusiasm and expectations of excellence, it’s a good bet he’ll return Alabama to national prominence down the road.
Alejandro Danois is a senior writer and editor with The Shadow League. The former senior editor of Bounce Magazine, he is also a freelance sports and entertainment writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, Sporting News, Baltimore Sun, The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, SLAMonline and Ebony Magazine, among many others.
