Hogs fill in stretch of off-days

FAYETTEVILLE -- The University of Arkansas men's basketball team is in the football portion of its schedule.

After the Razorbacks suffered their first loss of the season, 86-79 in overtime at Western Kentucky on Saturday, they will have a full week to practice before their next game against Tulsa on Saturday at Walton Arena.

Arkansas (8-1) has another week between games before playing Valparaiso on Dec. 21 in North Little Rock. The Razorbacks don't play again until Dec. 29 when they travel to Indiana.

That's three games in 21 days.

"I've kind of got the same mentality as a player," Arkansas Coach Eric Musselman said. "I'd rather play two games a week for the whole season.

"But if you look at college schedules, there are a lot of teams in December doing the same thing that we are."

Arkansas isn't allowed to schedule sporting events during final exams, which will run Monday through Thursday next week. There also will be some time off for the players to get a Christmas break between the Valparaiso and Indiana games.

Musselman said having time for so many practices before opening SEC play against Texas A&M on Jan. 4 means the Razorbacks essentially will have a second preseason training camp.

"We have three games in three weeks, and we're not going to have soft practices for those three weeks," he said. "We've got to clean up a ton of stuff, and so we'll grind for three hard weeks and have a training camp mindset."

Musselman said all of the players are healthy for practice, including sophomore guard Desi Sills, who took a hard fall on his left shoulder with 1:17 left in overtime at Western Kentucky and had to come out of the game after scoring a career-high 20 points.

"Desi is good," Musselman said. "He hasn't missed a rep this week. He's a tough kid."

The Razorbacks had a three-hour session Monday, including 30 minutes of film study before and after practice, and two hours on the court.

"Three hours is the longest we've gone since I've been here," said Musselman, who was hired in April. "Partially because it was after a loss. We had a lot of things to try to learn."

Musselman said the Razorbacks practiced two hours on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"I think you can go longer and more intense and more live when you have this break between games," he said. "I think it's good for us."

Musselman said it's also good for the players to have lighter practices later in the week.

"For the player, especially now with preparing to take finals, having five or six practices in a row, it becomes mentally draining for them at times," he said. "So we'll taper off Thursday and Friday leading up to the games."

Musselman said the Razorbacks have worked on some new plays this week.

"We'll add some things," he said. "We'll tweak some things."

Working on fundamentals also will be a focal point the rest of December.

"When you're playing two games a week, sometimes there are little things that you get away from emphasizing," Musselman said. "Maybe it's a defensive stunt, or maybe it's when your man picks up the ball, getting nose to nose with him on your smother.

"You have some slippage when you play game after game after game."

Offensively, Musselman wants to see better ball movement after the Razorbacks had 168 passes at Western Kentucky, including the overtime period. The goal for each game is at least 200 passes.

"We can really dive into film study and show the guys things," Musselman said. "We can say, 'Hey, we've got to move the ball more. Don't hold the ball so long.'

"You can clean up some things in your spacing, too. Like on your wing pick-and-rolls, you've got to get the ball foul line extended. That doesn't mean three-point line extended. It means foul line extended."

Playing at a faster tempo is being stressed in practice, too.

"Offensive pace," Musselman said. "We want to get back to running a little bit more than what we have of late."

Arkansas has a minus-1.6 rebounding margin on the season after being outrebounded 30-27 against Austin Peay and 44-39 at Western Kentucky in the past two games.

"We've started talking about chasing the ball more," Musselman said of the staff going over how to improve rebounding. "That's a new phrase that we've never introduced with the guys before, but we want to talk to them about chasing the ball more, rather than just rebounding in your area. How do you chase the thing? "

Wednesday's practice included an emphasis of going against zone defenses, which Arkansas has faced in most games.

"A word that we've introduced is 'deceptive,' " Musselman said. "How can be more deceptive to the defense? With our eye fakes -- not just ball fakes -- where we look and then go in a different direction."

Sports on 12/12/2019