FAYETTEVILLE — If there's one thing Eric Musselman learned in his time in the NBA, it's that players are motivated by numbers.
Spending day after day with elite athletes early in his coaching career, which included head coaching stints with the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings, that became more and more evident. So he flipped it into a positive that in turn would benefit his teams.
"It's one of the philosophies I brought from the NBA level," said Musselman, the former Nevada coach who was introduced as Arkansas' 13th men's basketball coach on Monday. "We will talk to guys, and if a guy is close to a double-double, I'll let him know, 'You're one rebound short of a double-double.'
"And I know for some guys that have not been to that next level, they're kind of like, 'That doesn't happen. We only talk about team stuff.' But, along with achieving individual success, your team is going have success."
The days of the Fastest 40 are no more. Pace and Space, a style Musselman has long emphasized thanks to his extensive background working in professional basketball leagues, is the name of the game now. Sunday night in his meeting with current Razorbacks players, he laid out his offensive and defensive philosophies, and it caught Arkansas guard Mason Jones' attention.
"He said we were going to have fun, play freely and said he was going to get us ready for bigger and better things outside of college basketball," Jones said Monday. "I'm ready to see what he's all about and I'm ready to see how he's going to lead us because we're all just going to accept him and get it rolling."
Mike Anderson-coached Arkansas teams were consistently in the top 100 nationally in terms of pace or possessions per game. Musselman's four teams at Nevada were in the same ballpark, and his final two averaged 69.4 and 69.3 possessions per game, according to KenPom.
Musselman described his style of play as "cosmetically pleasing" on Monday.
"We're extremely structured in what we want to do defensively," he said, "but they'll have a lot of freedom offensively, and I think these guys will want to play in that kind of system. ... We're going to give an incredible amount of energy, effort and enthusiasm when we play."
He is also, from his NBA roots, into analytics, which have come more to the forefront of college basketball over the last decade with the help of websites such as KenPom, HoopLens and Synergy. Analytics will tell you shooting 3s and getting to the free throw line are very important, Musselman added, and are aspects of the game that will be addressed and stressed in skill development.
"Those are two things we'll work on - not only shooting the ball from long distance, but when you get long, hard closeouts, the ability to break guys down and get to the foul line and to the rim," he said. "Those are some things we like to do offensively."
Shooting lots of 3-pointers isn't a far-fetched strategy for Arkansas' current roster. Per KenPom, 37.5 percent of the Razorbacks' shots last season came beyond the arc - the highest figure from an Arkansas team since Nolan Richardson's final season in Fayetteville in 2001-02 (39.1 percent).
The Razorbacks were also 41st nationally in free throw rate in 2018-19, but No. 308 in free throw percentage.
"I was really fortunate to live really close to Billy Beane out in California when he was with the Oakland A's," Musselman said. "I had the ability to pick his brain and figure out how we can try to flip that to basketball from what baseball does."
New York Knicks coach David Fizdale, who served as an assistant under Musselman at Golden State, is high on Musselman as an offensive mind.
"He is a basketball genius," Fizdale said. "Offensively, I don't think I've ever been around somebody so innovative and understands how to attack matchups and understands how to teach teams how to run.
"He never overdoes it and he teaches it enough to let the players play within a framework."
While many point to Musselman's knowledge and understanding of the offensive side of the game, and rightfully so, he's stern in the way his teams approach the other end of the floor. He aims to gamble defensively, but with discipline and intelligence.
He's inheriting many pieces from a roster that created a turnover on 22.5 percent of opponents' possessions last season - 16th nationally.
Musselman and his late father, Bill, who emphasized defense first, believed in opposing styles. Musselman's brand of basketball is his own, and he's eager and excited to bring it to Arkansas, a program and fan base hungry for postseason success.
"I just kind of started forming my own philosophy on trying to create own my style that fans would want to be a part of, that coaches would want to be a part of and especially at the collegiate level," he said. "The bottom line is that you have got to get your recruits excited and want to play in your system.
"So that is how we've come up with this 'Pace and Space' type of offense.”