For Danyelle Musselman, this year’s roster makeup that her husband has constructed is going to hopefully lead to a lot less sleepless nights.
“When I come home at night, I tell Danyelle all the time, there’s not as much coaching frustration,” Musselman said. “In reality, we’ve had one bad practice, I thought the whole summer. We’ve had a couple that we’d like the energy a little bit better.”
The amount of returning players is the most Musselman has held over since taking over as the Razorback coach.
“You get a guy like (Tramon) Mark who has played for such a great coach in Kelvin Sampson, he understands how to work hard, understands expectations,” Musselman said. “I think it’s different with experience. We’ve been able to accelerate some of our schemes. There’s no comparison.”
Each of the last three seasons, Arkansas has stumbled out of the gate in league play, even though all three teams eventually made the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament.
The 2020-21 team started 2-4, the 2021-22 team was 0-3 to start and last year’s team was 1-5.
What was the common theme with those teams? Youth. The first team was led by Moses Moody and later Devo Davis and last year’s team was full of freshmen that were counted on to contribute right away.
This roster construction should hopefully alleviate those early pitfalls in the SEC, especially on the road.
Musselman even looked for those characteristics when he was evaluating players in the transfer portal.
“When you go and you get into the transfer portal, you try to study a player analytically,” Musselman said. “You try to study how he did in league play. Try to study how he did against top 20 teams. We’ve studied the guys that we’ve gotten or even the guys that maybe we’ve missed on and didn’t get. There shouldn’t be a lot of surprises with a transfer due to the fact that you’re able to evaluate that player at a Division I level.”