USC easily dispatches Chattanooga in first win of Eric Musselman era
LOS ANGELES — Dangling over the railing by the home tunnel, waiting for Eric Musselman’s mid-major mishmash of a roster to emerge, was the only family at the Galen Center on Monday night who had bothered to bring a team photo for autographs.
USC season-ticket holder Arin Keshishian and his young sons started doing this last season, when Andy Enfield was leading the program. So before these Trojans’ season opener, Keshishian printed out a couple of photos from the team’s Facebook post of the group at the Venice Beach basketball courts. His sons stuck them through the banister on Monday, hoping to draw the attention of anyone in a cardinal-and-gold jersey who strolled past.
But a problem emerged. Keshishian furrowed his brows and scrolled on his phone, peering at a list of unrecognizable names.
“We don’t know,” Keshishian said, “who any of the players are.”
USC’s 77-51 drubbing of Chattanooga was the start of a new era, and empty red-cushioned seats far outweighed full ones on this sleepy Monday night, the Muss Bus boarding only a smattering of passengers in its first-ever stop at Galen. New staff. New roster, with senior Harrison Hornery the only returning scholarship player. But Musselman had done this before, transforming half-empty arenas into nightly sellouts at Nevada and Arkansas.
The first step: win.
“What we have to do is – we can control the people who came tonight,” Musselman said after the win, “deciding if they want to come back.”
It wasn’t exceptionally pretty. There was no Harlem Globetrotters warm-up, and little of the pomp-and-circumstance, on Monday, that Musselman has become so well-known for across his college career. There were a few hundred fans, maybe, and a cardinal-red strobe light in USC’s home tunnel, and a slickly edited pregame hype video that featured a real-life Muss Bus – no, seriously, a renovated school bus – on the JumboTron.
There was simple veteran grit, instead. Musselman had said the world should expect this USC team to play like “sewer rats,” and they dragged Chattanooga through the muck, forcing two shot-clock violations within the first nine minutes and rotating with discipline against a Mocs team that often over-rotated the ball on the perimeter.
An array of lengthy, versatile defenders held Chattanooga to 30% shooting in the first half, and a slow offensive start slowly leveled out as a group that had known each other for all of six months showed remarkably controlled chemistry with 21 assists against just nine turnovers. Boise State transfer Chibuzo Agbo Jr. nailed three second-half 3-pointers en route to 14 points, Yale glue-guy transfer Matt Knowling cut and soft-touched his way to 13, and Washington transfer Wesley Yates III both visibly confounded Musselman and delighted the Galen crowd with nine points and three assists.
“A lot of guys, if you’re not driving the bus, a lot of guys would just crash it,” Agbo philosophized after the game. “I think it just shows that we’re an unselfish team that – guys know how to win.”
Musselman’s rotation is still “fluid,” as he put it postgame, made difficult by the presence of 10 mostly veteran transfers and intriguing freshmen. Of any, though, Yates made his case for extended minutes, both visibly turning Musselman’s hair greyer on a slew of turnovers and burying a couple polished midrange looks.
“I mean, Wes is a bucket,” Agbo said of Yates, an explosive sophomore who missed all of his freshman year at Washington with injury. “He can get a bucket at any point, as y’all can see.”
Beyond Yates, Monday night’s viewing experience wasn’t quite cosmetically pleasing, as Musselman put it. In one huddle, he even gathered his group and told them they needed to have more fun.
“People,” Musselman told them, as he explained in his postgame press conference, “have to read your body language.”
There was competition for attention, Musselman affirmed, smirking that “another school played tonight” in a nod to UCLA. But the plan was simple: keep however many were already in the building, no matter how few.
“We have a lot of high expectations and goals we want to reach, including make a run deep in March Madness,” Agbo said.
“But, as we win and keep going on, I think it’s just going to – people are just gonna hop on the Muss Bus and start filling it up.”