Alabama men’s basketball coach Nate Oats said Monday that the season-ending injury suffered earlier this month by transfer guard Nimari Burnett happened during a warm-up drill early in a practice.
“Like, a 3-on-0, kind of breakdown drill we’re you’re not even going full speed,” Oats said. “It’s just one of those freak injuries that you probably couldn’t have avoided. Unfortunate for him, unfortunate for us. I thought he was gonna be a huge part of what we were doing this year.”
Oats, who spoke Monday to the Monday Morning Quarterback Club in Birmingham, said Burnett had been “playing great” before his injury in fall workouts.
“He had been shooting 60 percent from three,” he said. “He had just had his best workout, by far, the one before he went down. It’s disappointing.”
A former McDonald’s high school all-American and a transfer from Texas Tech, Burnett was expected to be part of a backcourt that will still include Jahvon Quinerly, returning leading scorer Jaden Shackelford, incoming five-star freshman JD Davison and senior Keon Ellis.
Burnett’s injury came after forward James Rojas tore his ACL in June. He still is expected to play this season, returning at some point during conference play.
“Hopefully still gonna get back at some point during SEC play,” Oats said Monday of Rojas. “His happened during the summer -- it happened a lot earlier, so he’s got some time to recover and still actually play some games.”
Oats added that second-year forward Alex Tchikou is not yet fully cleared from his Achilles injury suffered last year.
“Our depth is gonna be affected quite a bit,” Oats said. “We’re down to 10 scholarship guys cleared to play. Our depth is not what quite what we’d like it to have been. We’ve just got to avoid any further injuries. I think we’ll still be all right.”
Burnett and Rojas’ injuries this offseason came after Tchikou missed all of last season, and both Rojas and Juwan Gary missed the entire 2019-20 season with offseason knee injuries.
“It’s part of sports,” Oats said. “Going into Year 3, watching Alabama football, you see every year a key piece of theirs goes down. That’s why you’ve got to have depth. That’s why you’ve got to coach what maybe would’ve been your end-of-the-bench guys, because now all the sudden they’re rotation.
“It’s part of sports, it’s part of coaching. You’ve got to deal with it. It’s disappointing. It would be nice to have a season where we had no season-ending injuries and we had a full 13 guys to play. But it’s rare that that happens, to be honest with you.”
Oats said Alabama “has the best doctors” and Burnett’s recovery is “already going well.”
“Quinerly had to sit out our first year here,” Oats noted. “He came back here and had an unbelievable year our second year. Hopefully the same thing happens with Nimari where he sits out Year 1 with us and now he’s able to fully recover.”
Alabama will hold a closed scrimmage against Georgia Tech on Oct. 16 in Birmingham before a charity exhibition in Tuscaloosa against Louisiana on Oct. 24. Its first game is against Louisiana Tech on Nov. 9 in Coleman Coliseum.
“I think we showed that we showed that we’re capable of being one of the better teams in the SEC. Shoot, one of the better teams in the country, really,” Oats said Monday. “It didn’t quite end the way we wanted it to. We had an unbelievable year.
“The only high-major team to win the regular season and conference tournament, both. To lose in an overtime game when you shoot 11-of-25 at the free-throw line, knowing you should have won that game, it leaves you ready to play -- and you got a long way until you play another game. I can’t wait until we play.”
Mike Rodak is an Alabama beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mikerodak.
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