Musselman's staff a key cog in game-plan success
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Arkansas Razorbacks basketball head coach Eric Musselman is known as a game-planning savant, but not all of the credit for his team's preparation goes to him.
Musselman's staff — like most around the country — provide ample experience and unique perspective for him to draw from. One of those staff members is assistant coach and former NBA head coach Keith Smart.
"Keith being a two-time NBA head coach, I think the experience you can give to a player," Musselman said on Saturday. "I don't know if there's a team in the country that has that. Then the pro exposure that a lot of our guys have. With the way we've set up our scouting and stuff, it allows Keith to do special projects like that as Michael (Musselman) is doing personnel, as (Anthony) Ruta is doing how we want to play offensively and as Todd Lee is doing our defensive stuff and the opposing team's offense.
"It allows Keith to take more of an overview, big-picture look at our team and that allows him to do things like send El (Ellis) clips and things that we talk about in staff meetings. We need everybody."
Preparation is more than just focusing on your own team, however. Studying an opposing team's scheme and rotations is vital to game success. There might not be a better team in the country at gameplanning than Arkansas, and the team's staff is a big reason why.
"Right now, it's getting better at getting our opposing team's play calls," Musselman said. "So, Blake and some of our other guys stepped up today and we now have a better grasp of our next two opponents' play calls than maybe we had recently. We thought that was an area we were deficient in, so to speak.
"We want to improve our zone offense, and Coach Lee did a study on our zone offense with one of our outside services that we use. We found out that our zone offense is one of the best zone offenses in the country. We didn't know that unless somebody dives into it on a short sample size.
"All these guys are working around the clock. They do a great job. Coach Smart's experience is second to none of anybody in college basketball as an assistant coach."
Musselman went on to speak about the Razorbacks' game-plan discipline through the first eight games of the season and the experience of what preparation was like during the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament last week.
"Do we want to continue to evolve and improve, certainly," Musselman said. "I think I mentioned it after the Purdue game, which was an exhibition game, I thought we did a really good job executing that night.
"In the Bahamas, we had no prep whatsoever for North Carolina. There was no time. If you have 14 hours between games and you sleep seven of them. I mean, you've gotta eat two meals. So, I'm going to throw those last two games out from a preparation standpoint for the players. I think the new guys have done a good job, and we certainly want to continue to get better in that as well."
Up next, Arkansas (5-3) will take on the Furman Paladins (4-3) inside Bud Walton Arena on Monday. The game is set to tip off at 7:00 p.m. CT and will stream on the SEC Network Plus.