Eric Musselman jokes about fines from Greg Sankey, foreign referees

When Arkansas men’s basketball played a few exhibition games overseas during the summer, head coach Eric Musselman had put an emphasis on attacking the rim. At a preseason press conference this week, Musselman was asked if that will be more of a feature for the Arkansas offense this year.

The answer: Not really. The adjustment in the overseas games was to overseas refs. And Musselman couldn’t help but get a little quip in about how he can talk freely about these very-much-non-conference officials.

“I mean I don’t think commissioner [Greg] Sankey can fine me for talking about the officials overseas. But we’re going to have — the game is officiated overall different,” Musselman said. “From coaching Venezuela or Dominican national team, the whistle is just different. They don’t protect dribble drive attacks like they do in college basketball.”

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What the Razorbacks do need to emphasize, according to Musselman, is cutting.

“We gotta get better at — last year we were a great cutting team,” Musselman said. “We had two or three guys who were great cutters when they didn’t have the ball in their hands. We had great dribble-drive attack guys. So I think there’s a whole bunch of things.”

A new wrinkle for Arkansas will be more of a pronounced post game, offensively. Musselman thinks the Hogs will be able to more regularly feed the post and draw fouls, racking up some easy, efficient points.

The bigs just need to be mindful of not clogging up spacing.

“I do think we’ll be much better than we have been in the past throwing the ball in the post and getting fouled. And now we just gotta add the spacing to allow maybe a little more dribble-drive attacks. I think when we played big, one of the areas to get better at is our big men in the dunker spots gotta relocate out of dribble drive angles. And so that’s been something that we’ve added, maybe from the past,” Musselman said.