Hired to revive the University of Nevada men's basketball team, new coach Eric Musselman advised fans attending Wednesday's home opener to arrive 20 minutes early to see a team that won only nine games a season ago.
They did so not necessarily to watch the Wolf Pack improve to 4-1 with a victory over Portland State that night but rather to see a memory from Musselman's childhood — and from Gophers fans of a certain age — realized.
Fifteen years after his father, Bill, died at age 59, Eric Musselman brought back the showy pregame routine with ballhandling and dribbling tricks, as well as juggling and synchronized music that his father popularized while making the Gophers program relevant again in the 1970s.
Entrusted to rebuild a program that hasn't reached the NCAA tournament since 2007, Musselman showed old warmup video to his players two days after he was hired last March and asked them about perhaps trying it themselves.
The death of Timberwolves coach and executive Flip Saunders — who as a teenager led that Gophers pregame routine by barking out his coach's commands — last month at age 60 made Wednesday's re-creation all the more poignant.
Eric Musselman was in grade school when his father brought the routine to Minnesota. "I remember it totally," he said. "And I scrounged up every bit of video of it I could find."
Saunders babysat Eric Musselman when he was a boy. In high school, Musselman wore the same uniform No. 14 that Saunders wore as a Gopher.
"The best part of the night, our best execution, was the warmup," said Musselman, who that night wore a "Flip" lapel pin NBA coaches are wearing this season in Saunders' memory. "Honest to God, our guys nailed it. I was worried, but it was really, really good. It felt like Flip and my dad were there, watching and smiling."
