South Carolina’s men’s basketball team will play Alabama on Saturday night at Coleman Coliseum, following a midweek break. The Gamecocks enter the matchup with an 11-12 overall record and 2-8 in Southeastern Conference (SEC) play. Alabama stands at 17-7 overall and 7-4 in conference games.
The game is scheduled for 8:30 p.m. ET and will be broadcast on SEC Network, with Lowell Galindo handling play-by-play duties and Pat Bradley as analyst.
South Carolina aims to end a five-game losing streak in league action after a recent home loss to Missouri. In that game, Meechie Johnson led the team with 13 points, marking his tenth straight double-digit scoring performance. Over 11 SEC games this season, Johnson has averaged 19.1 points, 4.8 assists, 2.8 rebounds, and 1.5 steals per game. He is among four SEC players ranked in the top ten for scoring and top five for assists during conference play.
Through their first 24 games, South Carolina leads the SEC—and ranks seventh nationally—in free throw percentage at 78.7%. The team also places among the top five in the league (38th nationally) for fewest turnovers per game, averaging ten.
Alabama has won three consecutive conference games and four of its last five contests, losing only to Florida during that stretch. The Crimson Tide boasts one of the highest-scoring offenses in college basketball, averaging nearly 92 points per game—second nationally—and leading Division I in three-point attempts per game while ranking second in made threes per contest. They are also sixth nationwide in blocks per game and fifteenth in rebounds.
Sophomore guard Labaron Philon leads Alabama with an average of 21.4 points per game—the best mark in the SEC and eleventh nationwide—along with team highs in assists (4.8) and steals (1.3). Philon has scored at least twenty points fourteen times this season after recording two such games last year as a freshman.
Junior guard Aden Holloway (16.9), graduate guard Latrell Wrightsell Jr. (12.3), freshman forward Amari Allen (11.7), and sophomore forward Aiden Sherrell (10.5) also average double figures for Alabama; Allen leads with an average of 7.4 rebounds per contest.
In their series history, Alabama leads South Carolina by a margin of 36-16 overall—including a dominant edge when playing at Tuscaloosa—and has won ten straight meetings since February 2017.
The Gamecocks have had notable statistical achievements under head coach Lamont Paris:
– They hold a strong record when shooting above fifty percent or scoring eighty or more points.
– Defensively, they have excelled when holding opponents below seventy points or forty percent shooting from the floor.
– Multiple players have reached career milestones this season; Myles Stute scored his thousandth career point against Radford on November eighteenth, while Kobe Knox did so versus LSU on January thirty-first.
– Meechie Johnson became just the forty-eighth Gamecock to reach one thousand career points at South Carolina earlier this season.
– Elijah Strong joined a select group by scoring thirty points within twenty-five minutes during an early January win over LSU.
After facing Alabama, South Carolina will travel to No.14 Florida next Tuesday for another road contest.
