Musselman: Additions from portal complement returnees

South Dakota's Stanley Umude is shown during a game against Arkansas on Friday, Nov. 22, 2019, in Fayetteville.

FAYETTEVILLE — Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek passed through the training room at the Basketball Performance Center earlier this week and grew more excited about the potential of the men's basketball team in the 2021-22 season.

It was there that he ran into Davonte Davis and Jaylin Williams, key cogs in Arkansas’ run in the NCAA Tournament, and KK Robinson, who missed roughly half of last season after undergoing January surgery to repair a bone fracture in his foot. The future appears bright for Arkansas with those three freshmen in the fold.

Soon it will be Razorbacks coach Eric Musselman’s mission to mesh his returning players with new faces from the NCAA transfer portal. The Razorbacks’ staff has signed three players for next season — Au’Diese Toney of Pittsburgh, Chris Lykes of Miami and Stanley Umude of South Dakota — in the last two weeks.

Yurachek is confident Musselman, who signed a contract extension Wednesday to remain with the Razorbacks, will be able to do so.

“I’m sure Coach Musselman will fine tune (their) game and bring our new players (along) with our returning players,” Yurachek said. “Devo and KK and Jaylin are looking forward to the next season and getting better in the weight room and on the court.

“We’re in April and our season has been completed for about two weeks, and those guys are already dialed in and focused on getting better for next year. That’s the culture that Eric has set within our program.”

The soon-to-be third-year Arkansas coach said the goal when working the transfer portal this offseason has been to find players who complement returnees like Davis, Williams, Robinson and JD Notae. Musselman believes he and his staff have done that.

He is thrilled with the addition of Lykes, the 5-7 guard from Miami who he deems a dynamic and proven player in the ACC and a solid scorer. Musselman later raved Wednesday about the versatility of Toney and Umude, and the value of each player's experience.

“We still have a really young nucleus, so those three guys are really going to be able to help us,” Musselman said. “Then we’re excited about Chance Moore, an incoming freshman. But we’re really excited. I think we’ll continue to monitor what happens with the transfer portal, and even monitor the high school guys as well.

“But we feel really good with where we are right now roster-wise. Everyone talks talent, talent, talent, but you want to have really, really good chemistry, and you want roles to align with each other. Right now I feel like we have that.”

Nearly every player the staff has recruited from the transfer portal has been familiar with the program’s run in March. The Eight Eight appearance has helped “tremendously” in recruiting, Musselman added.

It has also hurt some players, he said, because they feel as if the Razorbacks’ roster is overloaded.

“Those are players that aren’t going to fit in our culture anyhow,” Musselman said. “Then there’s other guys, they really want to play in a winning environment, they really want to get better every single day in practice. The guys that have committed to us, they’re really excited with playing with Devo and Jaylin and JD, and so on and so forth.”

Umude is the most recent roster addition for the Razorbacks. One of the top players in the country in terms of scoring, shot percentage and usage rate in his final season at South Dakota, the 6-6 wing brings a lot to the table for Arkansas.

He averaged a career-high 21.5 points, 7 rebounds and 3 assists per game in 2020-21.

“He can do so much,” Musselman said. “He can post up against equal-sized or smaller players, he's got a great turnaround jump shot, he can make face-up threes, he can rebound the basketball, especially as a defensive rebounder. He's a good runner of the floor.

“He's in that perfect size range for us....I think just the versatility, really, of (Umude and Toney) becomes really, really important for us as we look at the style we want to play and the pace we want to play at and what we're going to do defensively as well."