Auburn dealing with injuries heading into contest with Tide

TUSCALOOSA | A quick glance at the rosters of the University of Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn Tigers going into Saturday’s 2 p.m. game at Coleman Coliseum immediately reveals a discrepancy.

One team has a Richard Hendrix-type player and the other does not.

Alabama, of course, has Hendrix himself, the 260-pund power forward who is third in the Southeastern Conference in scoring (19.1 points per game) and first in the conference in rebounding (10.0 rpg). Auburn’s corresponding inside players are sidelined by injury. Korvotney Barber, the 6-foot-7 Tiger forward who was leading the NCAA in field goal percentage early in the season, is out with a broken bone in his hand.

Babacar Aw, a 7-footer, may return soon for Auburn but Tiger coach Jeff Lebo didn’t sound optimistic about Aw’s immediate capacity to contribute in an AU coaches’ teleconference on Thursday.

Despite the injury problems, Auburn is 2-2 in the SEC while Alabama is 0-4 in league play. Still, both sides recognize that Hendrix will be Auburn’s first defensive concern.

“He’s incredibly strong,” Lebo said on Thursday. “He takes great angles around the basket. He has great hands. He plays smart and gets to the foul line. He’s a handful for anybody. They look toget him his touches against teams who are big, so they certainly will against us. You’ve got to surround him.

“When you think about how to defend against Alabama, you think about defending (Hendrix) first.”

“Our team knows that Richard is a pretty strong option for us,” Tide coach Mark Gottfried said at his Thursday press conference. “Given his shooting percentage (63.9 percent from the floor), we’d like to see him shoot it 40 times a game if he could. But that’s not possible. Other teams see the same thing we see and they try to stop it. We’ve seen that the last several games. Teams play two steps off their man and they are all one step closer to Richard. They put someone in front of him and someone behind him.

“We cannot be a team that has one person doing all the scoring. We’ve got to hit some perimeter shots, and we will. The other guys will step up and that will open things up for Richard inside.”

Saturday’s 2 p.m. game is sold out.

Reach Cecil Hurt at cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or at 205-722-0229.