TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The No. 7 Alabama basketball program continues its season in an unusual location on Wednesday as the Crimson Tide travels to take on the North Dakota Fighting Hawks.

The program is coming off one of the more difficult seven-game stretches in college basketball, where they went 5-2, defeating the likes of Houston, Creighton and North Carolina as they continue to work through the early part of the season.

Alabama’s making the 1,300 mile trip north to honor forward Grant Nelson and his contribution to the program as his home town of Devils Lake is just 90 minutes away, but what can the Crimson Tide really get out of playing the 314th ranked team in NET?

Read More: Grant Nelson Opens Up About Return to North Dakota

“Now we’ve got plenty of stuff we’ve got to work on,” Nate Oats said on Tuesday. “Now the question I posed to the guys is, can we work on it even when we know we’re the better team? Can we come into the game with the right mindset to continue to work on the things we said we needed to work on after we played those seven games and get better at it? We’ve got a good opportunity here.”

The Crimson Tide closes non-conference play with North Dakota on the road before finishing the month with Kent State and South Dakota State in Tuscaloosa. The opponents average KenPom rating is 180 with North Dakota heavily skewing the scale, rated at 302, making it the easiest three-game stretch of the season.

Alabama, the preseason pick to win the SEC, has looked the part through the season’s first 10 games, but the league looks as daunting as ever with five teams currently ranked in the top 10. The Crimson Tide’s had the luxury of playing a number of athletes as Alabama’s one of the deepest teams in the country, but Oats made it clear these last three games are about determining the rotations that gives him the best chance to win his third SEC regular season title.

“Obviously, we’ve got to get Chris [Youngblood] playing a few more minutes to continue to knock the rust off him because we know what he’s capable of and what we need out of him,” Oats said. “He’s a great kid. I thought he had a good practice today. The issue is, it’s not just his ankle, it’s when you don’t play for six-plus months or whatever it was he’s been out, everything’s got to get in shape. Your conditioning’s got to get back to speed. Your other parts of your body, your knee, your hip’s got to be able to move, it’s all of it. We’re trying to get him back up to speed and we’re focused on his ankle, but some of this stuff you can’t really work, basketball-wise, until his ankle was better and now that his ankle is pretty much better everything else has to get in shape.

“So, it’s going to take him a little bit to get back so we’re going to try to play him some more minutes. It’s hard playing 11 guys, we’ve got to get the rotation trimmed down. I’m not ready to trim it down yet. We’ll probably play three more games where we’re going with 11 guys and have to try to figure it out from there.”

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