Eric Musselman addresses struggles in the paint vs Tennessee

Eric Musselman was disappointed in a myriad of factors following Arkansas falling to Tennessee at home in a blowout earlier this week.

The first half between the Razorbacks and Volunteers was tight, but Tennessee pulled away in a big way over the second half of the SEC conference showdown. Afterwards, Musselman addressed some of his team’s struggles during the game, including Arkansas’ inability to stop the Vols in the paint.

“I thought they got whatever they wanted in the paint tonight,” Musselman stated, regarding the Razorbacks’ inability to stop the Volunteers down-low. “I thought that you know, hard post-ups and physical post-ups, and they established post position. When you catch the ball that deep, it’s pretty hard to stop somebody.”

As the experienced basketball coach knows, you’re not going to win many games when you get dominated down-low. That’s exactly what happened to Arkansas against their conference rival, and one of the main reasons why the coach was so disappointed in his team.

Now, after falling back to .500 and to just 3-8 in conference play, Arkansas once again has no time to pick themselves up. They’ll have just over two days to get themselves right before they have to take the floor again in Starkville this weekend.

We’ll see if they can do so, and if Eric Musselman can have his team play better down-low against the Bulldogs than the way they looked against Tennessee.

Eric Musselman explains what went wrong in the second half against Tennessee

Continuing, Musselman also assessed where his team went wrong over the final 20 minutes versus the Volunteers during his postgame press conference following the 92-63 defeat. He began by suggesting that the defense isn’t why the game got that far away from them because that aspect of their performance wasn’t great in either of the halves.

“I mean, in the first and second half, we gave up 46 points. So, defensively, not much different,” said Musselman. “Not good, either half, defensively.”

That then places the attention on the offensive side. Shooting under 38% from the field and under 35% from three wasn’t good to begin with. However, with 15 turnovers leading to 28 points as well as only 15 attempted free throws, Arkansas didn’t do enough on that end to keep up with the pace that they were allowing Tennessee’s offense to play to.

“Tennessee? More physical than us. Created more turnovers. The points off of turnovers was a killer,” said Musselman. “We’ve talked about our inability, at times, to take care of the basketball. Live-ball turnovers was a huge, huge problem tonight.”

“We’ve got to draw free-throws attempted. That’s our game. Tennessee is a very, very physical team. Tennessee opponents, I think in SEC play, average over 22 free throws attempted. Tonight? We get 15,” Musselman noted. “We had a goal of trying to get there to 30. Thought that was a realistic goal and we got half of those. So we’ve got to do a better job of playing through contact or initiating contact. That was a big part of the game plan and we were unable to get free-throws attempts.

On3’s Sam Gillenwater contributed to this article.