Basketball usually took a backseat in early conversations between Eric Musselman and prized recruit Alijah Arenas.
On one side was a teenage phenom navigating an early jump to college. On another was a USC men’s basketball coach more curious about Arenas’ mood, when he woke up and how he made sense of the people and the world around him.
And so when USC’s coach stood in front of the Galen Center’s vibrant new scoreboard Friday morning — two days after it was announced that Arenas would miss six to eight months with a knee injury — Musselman found himself stammering, stitching together the words to encapsulate what the freshman meant to him.