NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: SECOND ROUND - ARKANSAS VS KANSAS

March 17, 2023

Eric Musselman

Wells Fargo Arena

Arkansas Razorbacks

Media Conference

THE MODERATOR: We are joined by Coach Eric Musselman. Opening statement?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Obviously Kansas, one of the best teams in the entire country. Great job sharing the basketball, moving the basketball. One of the highest assist teams; 16th in the country in assists. Great basket cutters. Great movement without the ball. They do a great job setting flare screens.

Star players in Gradey Dick and obviously Jalen Wilson, and then great point guard play. You know, you can see this is a ball club that has clearly defined roles. Their starting five is as good as any starting five in the country, if not the best starting five in the entire country.

Q. Coach, you always talked about when Isaiah Joe was a Razorback, how it was like playing four-on-four. Do you see similarities with Gradey Dick and what he does for Kansas' offense?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: I don't think there is any question that you got to stay attached to him. You have to keep your core defensive principles, but certainly your help off of him, especially on the strong side, you need to be concerned with that for sure.

He does a great job with his pump fake game. He does a great job with backdoor cuts. He does an excellent job moving without the ball. And he's a really good offensive rebounder.

So there are a lot of factors when you guard Gradey Dick, a lot of factors that you gotta consider.

Q. Coach, talk about your thoughts and how unique it is when you are looking at your opponent and maybe the biggest question mark is the other team's head coach? Any thoughts you have of Bill Self in your past?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Well, as all of us college coaches, incredible respect for Coach Self. Great respect for him. When I was looking to get into college basketball, one of the places that I asked to visit and hangout with was at Kansas, and Joe Dooley helped facilitate that.

I was able to watch several practices and hangout in staff meetings, so great respect for Coach. When my wife was in the media in Kansas City she obviously covered Coach Self when he was there, so there's great respect.

When my daughter was doing March Madness stuff media-wise for their online stuff, she got to interview Coach Self, I don't know, four years ago or whatever it was.

Having said all that, I do know their staff, especially Kurtis Townsend, and, look, this staff is -- they've been together for a long time. Certainly we all want Coach to be as healthy as possible and to get back to coaching as quick as he can. But having said, that they're a well-oiled machine in how they go about their business and how they execute.

Certainly concerned with those guys out on the floor just like I'm sure their staff is really not concerned about any of us on the sidelines. At this point and juncture with the short turnaround I think a lot of it comes down to player productivity and who has a big game and who can try to absorb as much as possible from a game plan standpoint in a short turnaround.

Obviously the second half of these back-to-back -- when you win a game in this tournament, the second game at each new site you go to becomes a little more difficult from a prep standpoint.

Q. Eric, did you in fact hear from John Daly after the game yesterday?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Yes. Four texts.

Q. What did he have to say?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Very happy with our free throw shooting. That's not a joke. I really do get several texts, and sometimes we do converse, believe it or not, late night on our lack of free throw shooting.

I sent him -- just so everybody knows, I did send him several of your guys' Tweets, and I think he felt good about that, too, that we acknowledged him in a press conference.

Q. On a serious note, I was hoping to get your perspective on another coach here in Des Moines, Rodney Terry, because you have had such a wealth of experience in coaching. Can you try to imagine being in the position he found himself in this year?

What do you make of the job he's done? And as a coach, how difficult, how odd would it be to do what he's been doing?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Coach Terry was at Fresno State when I was at Nevada, so a lot of competition. He's a great coach. He is a fierce competitor. You know, when you're on the sidelines against somebody sometimes you can really feel the opponent coach's personality. His teams always played so hard. Loose balls were hard to get against Coach Terry's teams.

Obviously they're -- right now they're in a different conference than us so I don't watch him that much, but certainly the job that he's done, I think his personality and his experience would lend himself to be able to come into a situation like that and provide stability and provide leadership.

They have some great assistant coaches on that staff, too. We just happen to be one of the teams that played Texas in an exhibition game to open their new building and we got hammered pretty good. So the talent level on that team and the experience that they have, I think you've got to give their players a lot of credit as well. Their veteran guys have done a great job, Allen and Carr. Those two guys in particular have really done a phenomenal job leading their team.

Q. In this third year you have played number one seed -- I know you would probably play them in a later round, but what do those experiences do for you? They're number one for a reason, but they don't win all the time. How do you feel about the opportunity you guys have here? The last few years a number one has gotten knocked off a fair amount of time in the second round.

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Yeah, I think, number one, I mean, Kansas is -- they're really good. You're talking not only number one seed but defending champions, veteran players, a star player.

But we talked this morning at breakfast. We talked about our experiences playing Baylor. We talked about our experiences playing Gonzaga. Some of the things that we did really well, some of the things that maybe we could have improved on against Baylor.

We talked about the mentality that you need to have going into this particular game. I don't know what -- not good luck to play three number ones in three years. I don't know if that's ever happened before. But if it has happened before it certainly hasn't happened with many programs.

I'm talking about in the history of this tournament. That would be a good project for you, Bob, to find out who has been in that position.

Q. Ricky had a good bounceback game and Makhi has played well in Nashville and carried over to here. What do you think about Ricky's bounceback game and Makhi's performance in the last two games?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Ricky has been our leading scorer, a guy we tried to rely on as a go-to player. He's a high-volume free throw attempt player. He can make threes. He's a great transition player.

We certainly needed his baskets last night, and I thought above all that stuff, Bob, I thought the one thing Ricky did an awesome job at and something we have really needed from him, because he's got the ability with his length, his strength, combination of speed, quickness off the floor, is the defensive rebounding. I thought his rebounding last night was really, really vital for our win.

The question about Makhi Mitchell, he's been consistent throughout the year for us providing paint protection, providing blocked shots, range rebounding outside of his area. He's a really good pick-and-roll offensive player in short rolls and being a dynamic rim roller.

We have not up to this point really had to double the post because he does such a good job one-on-one defending post offensive players.

He's played great the last three games. I think he's feeling more confident in the system. I think he's rising to the occasion of big games. That's what you want from one of your older players on your roster. You want those guys to -- as we get to this time frame and every game becomes a win-or-go-home situation, you want a guy like that to play at a high level.

Q. I asked Kevin McCullar who played at Texas Tech two years ago what he remembered about Arkansas two years ago. He mentioned the Hinkle Fieldhouse, playing Devo. How have you seen him as now one of the better defenders in the country?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: It's pretty wild that yesterday we played two guys that were on other teams in other NCAA Tournaments, and now we're playing a third guy.

He's a great cutter. I mean, that is the greatest compliment. If you turn your head and you don't have your head on a swivel, he's backdoor, dunk. He's a great rebounder. He's a tough, physical, loose ball getter. He's a big part of what Kansas does.

I have great respect for a guy that blends in with some other really good offensive players, and he's really capable of having a great offensive night as well. He's an excellent defender. Our guys, you know, have great respect, and know that he's a guy that's kind of an X-factor for them.

Q. You were talking about mentality earlier. The interview with Tracy Wolfson after the Gonzaga win last year, and you talked about no one believed in us. Do you see similarities from the number one overall seed in Gonzaga and how you prepare for this game tomorrow?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: I don't think many people believed in us yesterday going into that game. Yeah, I think we need to play with a free mind. We need to not feel pressure, which I don't think we felt pressure yesterday.

I don't think we will feel pressure going into the Kansas game. We know -- again, we know that this is a team that -- the defending champions and a number one seed. Our guys are smart. They're on Twitter. They're on Instagram. They know. They know what we're playing against. Like I said, we have incredible respect for them.

Q. Norm Roberts said Arkansas has more athletes than anybody else in the country. What do you think about that?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: It's a great compliment. We do have some great athletes, obviously. And they are at different positions. That's kinda the style of play that we have. It dictates your personnel, and I think the way we play is to try to accentuate our athleticism.

Q. Nick is 1-10 second half against Texas A&M; 2 of 10 yesterday. Even I know that's 3 in 20, very uncharacteristic. In a weird way is it good because he may bust out against Kansas?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: I think everyone puts one of their best defenders on Nick. He draws attention when he's playing off the bounce in pick-and-roll. But that also opens up things for other guys on the team.

So, you know, his ability to get in the paint and find people becomes important for us as well as teams focus and shade an extra defender at him.

Q. I think you are 3-0 in second-round games, and last two years you had to win the second game to get to the Elite Eight, and you have done well in two days to get ready. What do you think about being 3-0 to second round games?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: The key is having good players. That's the key. Having good players that can -- I think maybe they're used to information being given to them and giving us feedback to, hey, Coach, we've had enough or we can handle a little bit more. I think that player feedback becomes important. We're trying to squeeze in as many mini film sessions -- we have a full court and a half-court in our meeting room taped down, so that we can -- every time we eat we try to squeeze a 5-minute segment in to do a little bit of a walk-through in the ballroom and I think that becomes extremely important.

Obviously today we don't do much on the floor just because of a game that starts late afternoon, so there is no reason to go out there today and to go up and down. So it will be a lot of mental stuff on the floor today.

Q. Looking at your schedule, you ran off eight straight wins and gone through some -- three or four weeks --

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Struggles?

Q. -- where you struggled a little bit. Obviously the schedule dictates part of that, but what are the tangibles things that go well for you guys when you succeed, and what goes wrong when you guys are not hitting on all cylinders?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: I think if you look at some of the games that we've lost, they've been true road games. Early in the SEC schedule we struggled, because I think it was just kind of new. We had played home games and then we had played neutral site games in Maui.

One of the best players in college basketball, Trevon Brazile goes down with a knee injury; Nick Smith is not with us to start, then he's with us for a little bit, then he's out, then he comes back.

I think any team with college-age student-athletes, there's a lot of stuff going on and you're trying to balance it. I thought yesterday was as good of a game as we have played all year.

I said before we started our Illinois prep that I thought we were still a ball club that's getting better and I truly believe that. We have 12 scholarship players suiting up tomorrow, six of them are freshmen. Half of our team tomorrow that's going to suit up are freshmen. That's a young team. That's a young roster. Only two guys that are returning players.

If you go to back-to-back Elite Eights you're going to go through a process where you don't have a lot of returning guys, because we do have some guys like Jalen Williams that went to the NBA after their sophomore year.

So I think that is maybe why we have struggled at times. But we've been in every game, for the most part. There's been a lot of one-possession games, whether it's at Baylor. A lot of one-possession games.

So the fight, the grit, the giving yourself a chance to win at the end of the game, that's been there for most of the season. So it is a competitive group.

Q. Eric, Anthony Black, wondering what do you think of his play yesterday and his first NCAA Tournament game, and what do you expect from him tomorrow? How important is he tomorrow?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: I thought Anthony was great. He's been pretty banged up for about the last month. I think the biggest thing I've been impressed with is his availability. I mean, he practices every day. He went through a couple weeks ago with an ankle sprain that was really bothering him. He obviously absorbs a ton of contact and he just keeps picking himself up off the floor and going and competing.

But his length, his ability to see over the defense, his ability to defensive rebound and we've kind of -- some of our defensive match-ups have changed of late, meaning the last couple of games where we have been able to do some things defense defensively matching up maybe differently than we did earlier in the year.

He's guarded some bigger players of late, rather than just the point guard. I think through the first 20, 21 games he was primarily guarding only the point guards. We've kind of been able to put him on multiple people during the course of a game, which is a little bit different than the we way used him earlier in the year.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach. Best of luck tomorrow.