Eric Musselman reveals how Arkansas fixed turnover issues against Missouri

The Arkansas basketball team nearly broke out of its recent skid against Missouri, but it couldn’t come through down the stretch and ultimately fell 79-76, despite fixed turnover issues that plagued the team in the first half.

The Razorbacks were quite sloppy with the basketball in the opening stanza.

In the first half alone Arkansas turned it over 14 times. The situation was improved in the second half, and coach Eric Musselman said his team fixed the turnover issues by simply being a little more assertive.

“Just meeting the ball, being a little bit stronger with the basketball,” he said after the game. “I thought we just, the first half, we were just way too careless with the ball. Didn’t jump stop enough when we did get a head of steam. Had some charges.”

That early hole proved too much to overcome, even after Arkansas largely fixed the turnover issues, cutting them down by half in the second half (the Razorbacks finished with 21 turnovers in the game).

Missouri made the plays it needed to down the stretch to eke out the win, handing Arkansas its fourth straight loss and its fifth in the last six games. Still, there were positives that Musselman took away from the road trip.

Arkansas still playing hard, Musselman says

For a team that has lost five of its last six, Musselman is still pleased with how hard his team is playing. That’s no small feat.

Two of the last five losses have been by just one possession.

“I mean, as a coaching staff, you want your team to play as hard as they possibly can. I thought that was the case tonight. (But) it’s just a team that has not figured out how to win in crunch time,” said Musselman. “So that’s (now) our coaching staff’s job to continue to talk and breakdown late-game situations. I thought this was an improvement. But the way we’ve played over the last six games is not what it’s been for the last four years. So we’ve got to continue to try to figure this out.”

Arkansas will return to action on Saturday with a home game against Ole Miss that is scheduled for a noon ET tip on ESPN2.