Arkansas head coach Eric Musselman’s track record has been well-documented, and it was brought up yet again Wednesday at SEC Media Day. His basketball pedigree has to be one of the best in college basketball.
The son of a college and NBA head coach, Musselman has blazed his own path as a college and NBA head coach, as well, adding stops in the CBA, ABA, and NBA G-League.
While times have changed from the days of his dad allowing just 33.6 points per game, Musselman has shown that he can change with the times, using his experiences in the “minor leagues” of basketball.
“When you coach in the minor leagues, you wake up one day and your top three players might be gone,” Musselman said. “It changes the way you teach, it changes the way that you implement a system. Just looking at our own team with only two returners, a lot of the format we’ve used this summer in implementing things both offensively and defensively is much the same that we used while coaching in the minor leagues and certainly changing, fluctuating roster. I don’t flinch with that at all.”
Harkening back to his days coaching the “minor leagues,” Musselman has embraced the newest craze in college basketball: the transfer portal. In just four offseasons, Musselman has brought 18 transfers into the Razorback program.
Utilizing the portal hasn’t made the Head Hog neglect recruiting in the high school ranks.
On the contrary, Musselman is attempting to land his third top-10 ranked recruiting class in his four years in Fayetteville. The 2022 class ranked second nationally and featured three five-stars and McDonald’s All-Americans, while the 2020 class produced two NBA Draft picks so far. One of those picks was Moses Moody, the first one-and-done player in program history.
This current team is even younger than normal, though, with six freshmen in the 2022 class.
While high school recruiting might be the tried and true method of building a program compared to the transfer portal, so many freshmen on one roster is another adjustment for Musselman.
“We have slowed down our teaching to a snail’s pace at times,” Musselman said.
Musselman has coached veteran-heavy teams in the past, but this year won’t that way. He’s having to practice a new trait that might not come easy to him: patience.
“Patience is going to be a word all year long,” Musselman said. “Six out of thirteen freshmen is a lot, it’s new for me. It might not be new for some other coaches in college but it’s new for me. We’ve historically had a veteran-laden team, whether it was at Arkansas or even Nevada, but our teams have also tended to get better as the season’s progressed, so you’d think… across the board we’re really, really young and hopefully we get better. But patience is a word that we use oftentimes in our staff meetings.”