University of South California Basketball Coach Eric Musselman’s Offensive Philosophy

• By Grant Young

While having great basketball coaching resources is surely beneficial, there’s more to helping your team win than getting the X’s and O’s nailed down. Since basketball is a team game that relies on multiple players executing their roles and playing in cohesion with one another, coaches must learn how to help guide their team’s offense, rather than direct it. 

Not to mention that, because basketball success is so much predicated on individual talent, sometimes a coach should let their best players improvise on the court, rather than constrain them with set offensive schemes. 

All of these reasons indicate why having an offensive coaching philosophy should be a prerequisite for basketball coaches at every level. But if you don’t how to build your offensive philosophy, let Eric Musselman provide you with a blueprint. 

On April 4, 2024, Eric Musselman was named head coach of the University of Southern California men’s basketball team. Before signing with USC, Coach Musselman was head men’s basketball coach at the University of Arkansas since 2019. 

Musselman has more than 30 years of coaching experience. In his five years as a collegiate head coach, Musselman’s teams have won at least 20 games each year. Before entering the collegiate head coaching ranks, Musselman was a head coach for seven professional teams, including two seasons with the Golden State Warriors (2002-04) and one with the Sacramento Kings (2006-07). He has won over 500 games as a professional head coach with an overall winning percentage of .634 (508-293).

Coach Musselman prides himself on his offensive philosophy. And he was willing to share his insights in his ‘Offensive Clinic’ course from the Arkansas Basketball Coaches Association. We have taken some of his most prudent insights and compiled them below, for you to use when helping you create your offensive philosophy. 

Adjusting to Personnel

Regardless of what level you coach at, you’re going to have to deal with your roster changing from year to year. This unavoidable fact makes it crucial for coaches to identify which players they can use to fill which specific roles as early as possible.

For example, Coach Musselman discusses how he didn’t know who his team’s closer would be at the beginning of one season. But he managed to solve that problem by moving one of his current players to a new position, which opened up offensive opportunities for him to succeed in the pick and roll.

Coach Musselman noted that the bottom line when it comes to adjusting personnel is that coaches must keep an open mind. They can’t have a single-track-minded, “my way or the highway” approach when it comes to putting their players in specific roles or positions, because there may be another strategy that will be more conducive to scoring points. This same reason is why coaches need to listen to their assistant coaches, who may be able to see things that the head coach can’t. 

Importance of Being Adaptable

“Are you willing to tailor your system to what your personnel is?” 

Going off of the last point, Coach Musselman stresses once again how important it is for coaches to be adaptable, because of the fluctuating nature of rosters at every level. 

That being said, a coach should always keep a few core pillars/metrics in mind when crafting their offensive philosophy, as guiding points to assess how they’re performing, and whether the philosophy itself needs any adjusting. 

Coach Musselman’s two key metrics are Free Throw Attempts and Ball Security.

Free Throw Attempts are an important metric for Coach Musselman because they portray a culture of aggression and hard-nosed play. If your team is constantly getting to the free throw line, then they’re a physical offensive team that is typically controlling the battle in the paint. Not to mention that free throw attempts are some of the simplest shots your team will receive in any given game. 

And ball security is important for obvious reasons. While this isn’t itself a specific metric, Coach Musselman analyzes his own team’s ball security by their assist-to-turnover ratio. Coach Musselman instills this aversion to turnovers in his team by forcing every single person in the facility to do 10 pushups whenever a player commits a turnover during practice. This includes players, coaches, and any team staff members, such as trainers or strength coaches. 

Coming up with creative, engaging punishments like this for turnovers is a great way to make that a core philosophy for your offense. 

Play Calling

Coach Musselman stresses that he has an offensive play called for just about every scenario in games. Even during jump balls, he will call a play that factors in his team’s studying of an opponent’s jump balls. Once he figures out what the other team typically does if they lose a jump ball, he will devise a specific play to attack that. 

Some of the other packages that Coach Musselman finds important are After Timeout play packages, After Free Throw play packages (for both made and missed free throws), Inbound play packages, and something for the first play of the game. 

For each of these, Coach Musselman tries to have at least 5 different plays he could call, and is always adding new ones so that his opponents never know exactly what his team might run. 

Maintaining this sense of unpredictability is extremely important for Coach Musselman because he doesn’t want his players to feel like they’re going through the motions in practice. If they always have to learn something new, then they have no choice but to be engaged and work their minds. 

These are some of the techniques that Coach Musselman imparts, which you can use to help create your own offensive philosophy on the basketball court.