Arkansas men's basketball head coach Eric Musselman is many things, but unprepared is not one of them.
Following the Hogs' 1-2 mark at the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament in the Bahamas — a win over Stanford and losses to Memphis and North Carolina — Musselman said he believes the Razorbacks have multiple areas to improve on as they get ready to face the Duke Blue Devils in the ACC/SEC Challenge on Wednesday in Fayetteville.
"Any time you've played the way that we have the last three out of four games, we need to play better basketball than we have," Musselman said Monday. "How we are mentally today when we go down to practice as opposed to how we are mentally at 8 o'clock on Wednesday, they're two different things. So, I know how I am mentally. I'm not sure how they are, but I know how I am."
To help combat the issues plaguing his team, Musselman decided to go back through all of the film from the Battle 4 Atlantis to make film cut-ups for each player.
"I wanted to break down every single little tiny detail that needs to get cleaned up," Musselman said. "I wanted the responsibility or the voice to come from the head coach on exactly what areas we want each guy to get better at."
According to Musselman, it took about 14 total hours to go through all three games play-by-play to put together the individual film cut-ups.
"Whoever was in the game basically got every single play for the last three games," Musselman said. "Luckily, I got a real good staff that told me to stop instead of going back to the UNCG game because I went in reverse order of how we broke it down and moved on to Duke film today. I've never watched more film over a 24-hour period in my entire coaching career than I did in the last 24 hours."
The breakdown in film was much-needed for Arkansas, which didn't get much of a chance to completely review everything with so little time in between games.
"Obviously when you play Stanford and the game ends and it’s 11:30 at night," Musselman said. "Unless you guys some way of having a player rest and you play less than 24 hours. Then you start your prep, you are not able to do what we call our “cleanup”. You kind of got to go to the next game and prepare because you only got about two film sessions and a walkthrough in a ballroom.
"Then you have another game less than 18 hours after that one, so yesterday was the first time we really had the opportunity through video to break through our own cleanup. Because we went from one team’s prep to the next to the next. Quite honestly, this isn’t a long prep either because we took off Saturday and Sunday. Very seldom do we take two days off but we did based on three games in three nights."
Heading into a matchup with a No. 7 Duke Blue Devils team, the Razorbacks need to clean up the foul trouble and increase the amount of team steals to help create more offense from their defense, according to Musselman.
"I mean, Joseph Pinion has played very, very limited minutes, and has similar steals to some of our guys that have played over 100 minutes more than him," Musselman said." So defending without fouling… I mean, if we were fouling a lot AND getting a lot of steals, (laughs) that would make sense. But we’re fouling a lot AND not getting steals. Probably a recipe for being where we are. So that’s one area that goes hand-in-hand.
"Offensively, a lack of assists. We need way more assists. The ball’s got to move way better than it has. So those are areas that we have to improve in."
Arkansas currently ranks 233rd in the country in steals per game, as it's averaging 5.7 per contest. At this same time a year ago, the Razorbacks ranked 16th in the country in steals per game at 10.8.
"Well, when you play the same defensive schemes and you have the same drills, then it just comes down to individual [players]," Musselman said. "If we had changed our scheme and had become a little bit more passive defensively or we’re keeping the lane a little bit more compact, across the board need way more activity with our hands."
Arkansas (4-3) will take on No. 7 Duke (5-1) on Wednesday inside Bud Walton Arena. The game is set to tip off at 8:15 p.m. CT and will be broadcast on ESPN.
