NEWARK, N.J. – Alabama shot the lights out and set a new NCAA Tournament record by hitting 25 three-pointers (eclipsing the previous record of 21 set by Loyola Marymount in 1991), as the Crimson Tide dismantled a defensively helpless BYU team, 113-88, Thursday night to advance to the East Regional Final. Alabama, seeking its second consecutive Final Four, will face top-seeded Duke, a 100-93 winner over Arizona in the second game at the Prudential Center.
Alabama shot 53 percent from the field and 49 percent from three-point range, which was a recipe for a blowout. But even more importantly, Alabama’s best player and leader, 6-foot-1 senior guard Mark Sears, finally broke out of a weeks-long slump. Sears scored 34 points on 11 of 18 shooting, 10 of 16 from beyond the arc, and dished out eight assists. It is the type of game Sears needed to have and Alabama needed to see him to have.
“Listen, I’ve got to teach these guys some math,” Alabama coach Nate Oats said after the game. “I told Sears there’s a thing called regression to the mean. His last six games he was shooting 14 percent (from 3-point range), five of 35. He’s not a 14 percent shooter, obviously.”
To put Sears’ slump in perspective, he hadn’t shot over 50 percent in a game since February 19th against Missouri. He had shot under 40 percent from the field in four of his last five games and he hadn’t shot over 30 percent from three-point territory in a game since March 1st at Tennessee. Coming into the BYU game, Sears was shooting 11% from three in the NCAA Tournament.
Even though Sears said “even when I was shooting 14 percent my confidence was still high,” Alabama’s uneven performance over the last month of the season said otherwise. Sears’ breakout performance against BYU instantly makes the Tide a much more dangerous team moving forward.
“The game of basketball is all about having momentum and when you have good momentum, I feel like that’s going to be a big factor in carrying over to the next game,” Sears told Hoops HQ after the game.
Basketball is a game of confidence and there is no bigger confidence booster than seeing the ball go in the hoop as much as Sears did against the Cougars.
“I’m pretty sure that confidence is going to be there for (Sears) for sure and for all of us as a team,” said Alabama’s Labaron Philon, a 6-foot-4 freshman guard. “That was a great win we got and I think that can give us motivation for whoever we play next. That was a great thing to get that confidence back.”
Of course, every game and opponent are different and BYU is not known for its defense, ranking only 82nd in defensive adjusted efficiency, according to KenPom.com. Duke, Alabama’s next opponent, is fourth in KenPom’s defensive rankings. However, when the Tide are clicking on all cylinders and Sears is playing with confidence, they can play with any team in the country, as they showed in the SEC and non-conference this season.
It says a lot about Alabama that even when Sears was going through his struggles, the Tide was still able to get wins at Auburn, versus Kentucky in the SEC Tournament and reach the Sweet 16 after two solid NCAA Tournament games. But to have a realistic shot at the Final Four this year, they needed Sears to be at his best and it looks like they have that now.
“When you make shots at a high clip like that you’re going to be hunting them and have a lot of confidence when you shoot them,” Oats told Hoops HQ after the game. “We’ve got to be great. Duke’s been one of the best in the country all year, Arizona’s playing great basketball. Whoever comes out of this it’s going to take a colossal effort, especially on the defensive end for us to win it. But at least we know our confidence will be high on the offensive end.”
With Sears seemingly in a can’t-miss-mode, there’s a reason for Alabama to be confident.
