Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats made two decisions before Wednesday’s game at LSU.

One was necessary -- sitting senior guard James Bolden, who was dealing with an illness.

“He made the trip, but there’s something going on with his GI system to where they’ve got to get more testing done,” Oats said. “He hasn’t been able to eat food for three days and just didn’t have enough energy to go. He’d been gettings IVs before games, and they didn’t even think that would give him enough energy to play tonight, so he stayed in the locker room.

“We’re supposed to, I think, go over the next two days, Thursday and Friday, to get a bunch of testing done. They’ve been doing testing, but they haven’t figured it out yet.”

The other was one Oats seemed to regret following the 90-76 loss to the 22nd-ranked Tigers at the Maravich Center -- bringing junior guard John Petty off the bench after he had started every game this season and led the Crimson Tide in scoring through 19 contests.

“We’ve just got to get our leaders practicing better,” Oats explained after the game. “I tried to make a statement with that. It obviously backfired. He’s one of our best players. We need him in there. Obviously, he played a lot of minutes. He still played 33 minutes.

“But we haven’t been practicing hard enough, in my opinion. I mean, we’d won four in a row, but that was not -- our best basketball was probably played against Auburn. I thought we’d been playing worse since that Auburn game. We’ve played some teams we’re capable of beating at the level we were playing, but we’ve got to get back to practicing a lot better and coming out and playing harder than what we’re playing right now.”

Alabama junior guard John Petty

Trailing 51-33 at halftime, Alabama trimmed LSU’s lead to single digits twice Wednesday night, but the Tigers’ effort on the glass was too much to overcome on the road for Oats’ squad. LSU out-rebounded UA, 49-31, which led to a 20-5 advantage in second-chance points.

The first-year coach’s first comment after the game was it was “definitely not our best effort.”

“Our effort didn’t match theirs in the first half,” Oats said. “They destroyed us on the boards. That’s two games in a row now where we just can’t rebound the ball. It caused major problems. I thought our effort was better in the second half, but it just wasn’t enough.

“When you give up that big of a lead, give up 51 points in the first half, you really dig yourself a hole against a team like this that plays as hard as they do. That many points in the first half is going to be too hard to overcome. But I thought our guys showed some fight in the second half. We did a lot better, but I think we cut it to nine twice. We only had nine turnovers for the game, but the first time you cut it to nine, we turn the ball over, they score, turn it over immediately on the inbounds play and then they score again, and it goes right up to 13.

“We just couldn’t get over the hump so a lot of credit to them. They’re a hard-playing team. There’s a reason they’re first place, all alone in the SEC right now.”

Alabama will next play host to Arkansas on Saturday, Feb. 1, at Coleman Coliseum.

Contact Charlie Potter by personal message or on Twitter (@Charlie_Potter).