More Experienced Roster May Lower Stress for Eric Musselman

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — What a change a year makes. Oh, and for Arkansas' Eric Musselman, he just might be dealing with a little less stress this year adding some maturity and experience to replace all those talented freshmen he had a year ago.

"When I come home at night, I tell Danyelle all the time there’s not as much coaching frustration," Musselman said in a winding practice after Tuesday morning's practice. "In reality, we’ve had one bad practice the whole summer and then we’ve had a couple that we’d like the energy a little bit better, but I would say for the most part. We’re doing execution, we’re doing teaching, we’re doing 5-on-0 skeleton, dry-run type stuff."

This year there are 11 new faces, most of whom have played a lot of college basketball. It's bringing an entirely new level of experience and maturity.

"Every year’s different," Musselman said. "It’s really helped to have the returners back, meaning Devo and Jalen Graham and Cade Arbogast and Lawson Blake and Joseph Pinion, it’s helped. We have a little bit more returners than we’ve had. Then obviously with the experience that we have with guys like El Ellis, Jeremiah Davenport. (Trevon) Brazile’s helped a lot on the side. He still hasn’t jumped in with us full-go. But having returners along with veterans who have played a lot of college basketball games.

Brazile was emerging as one of the leaders before going down with an injury just before SEC play. With all of the juggling roster last year, plus some talented freshmen with freakish-type skills, Musselman wasn't able to focus the way he'd like on the realities of simply coaching the games and preparing for them.

The outlook for the season is simple and he's not even close to thinking about rotations yet. It's a lot of execution and installation of things he wants to do in games. They are performing well in practices with the experienced guys teaching the new ones how to do it.

"In no way, shape or form have we even come close to a rotation," Musselman said. "Roles are being formulated in the coaching staff and probably in the players’ minds I’m sure that the players are forming opinions of teammates and forming maybe who they trust or formulating who could be a go-to guy, and I use that term very loosely, like who could be, because that’s all going to evolve and develop.

"Whoever we are in November, we hope that — just like in the past — we’re much different come March. That could be rotation player wise, it could be set plays. We still have a lot to try to figure out, but it’s been a really good summer as far as working. Our mile times were much improved off the last four years. And then it’s a similar approach and adding type stuff that we had with our last year at Nevada, I would say."

No coach wants to play his best in November. The whole key to college basketball is make it to March, hopefully paying the best of the season and see where it takes. Musselman may be finding that a little easier with more experience and maturity.

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