As he took over a USC men's basketball program that had just one returning player once all the dust settled, Eric Musselman and his assistant coaches spent a month living together in a rented house in Manhattan Beach.

"Our whole staff stayed in it, guys were in bunk beds, and we called it ‘The Portal House,’" Musselman shared. "We’d literally, I mean, Michael [Musselman] and [Anthony] Ruta were in bunk beds, and it’d be like midnight, and I’d say, ‘Hey, what about that guy from so-and-so college?’ And it’d be like, you know, 12:30 at night. And coach [Will] Conroy stayed in it. It was pretty fun. It wasn’t a frat house, but it was a portal house.”

That's where Musselman and his staff worked the phones to land 11 transfers and two high school commits to fill out the roster.

"I know when I FaceTimed guys, and I had the background of Manhattan Beach, better than other places. I promise you that," Mussleman said. "We were like two blocks from the beach, so it was super easy. I kept telling the staff, ‘Get out of the house on the FaceTimes! Go walk the strand!’"

Musselman met with local reporters Thursday morning for the first time since his introductory press conference back in early April. The Trojans had just wrapped up their fourth summer practice together as Musselman reflected on the process of building that roster, where he thinks the Trojans' strengths will be and much more.

Watch the full interview here and scroll down for a complete transcript of his comments.

On rebuilding a roster from scratch ...

"Yeah, I think the landscape right now in college basketball, there’s a lot of programs going through only having one or two returning guys. You look at Kentucky’s roster. You look at Arkansas, you look at ours. It’s just kind of the nature of how everything goes. You have to be adaptable and adjust to it. But I do think my minor league background of having a new roster every two weeks, I guess I’m a little more suited to the current state of what everything is.

What was the first step to building this team?

"For us, we tried to start with high-quality, high-character guys. At USC, there’s an academic piece as well that our pool of recruits is maybe a little different than other places I’ve been. So I think that is an added piece or an added layer to your recruiting process here. But we wanted guys that really wanted to be here. And then I think from a stylistic kind of – we wanted guys that could play multiple positions. We felt in Year 1 that it was super, super important that we have versatility, meaning guys 6-5, 6-6, 6-7. And we do have some duplications of that. Some guys are gonna have to play out of position. We’re probably a little thin at two really important positions, meaning up front at the center spot and at point guard. Those spots, we don’t have a lot of numbers. But we recognize that. We’re gonna have to get a third and fourth guy that can play the point in the case of foul trouble. It’s gonna be a unique experience for that player. I don’t know if it’s Jalen Shelley, who has been a high school four-man, or Matt Knowling, who played the four at Yale, we don’t know. We’re going to kind of experiment with that."

Was it intentional to stock up on so many mid-major guys with experience?

"For us, it was Year 1, how to not make as – we all make mistakes. The NBA makes mistakes when they draft. The NFL. And they have years and years to go to practices and study guys, and they have private detectives doing background. We don’t have any of that. Our margin for misevaluation becomes higher at the college level. So the thought process was who did our staff see with our own eyes or how can we look at film and there’s a body of work against Division 1 players? That’s kind of the way we went about building it, not that it’s right, wrong, or indifferent. But that was our thought process – almost like an NBA team not having a bunch of draft picks and being super young and maybe going with some veterans that have experience. That was the thought process."

How many players did you evaluate or talk to?

"Oh wow, a lot. I couldn’t even – the group of players that we were recruiting in the Arkansas transfer portal and then here, a lot of people got eliminated just based on players that were going into their third or fourth year that weren’t grad transfers, they were kind of eliminated at USC. So there’s a whole pool of those guys that we just didn’t recruit. It was guys who have played 1-2 years or grad transfers. Two classes were pretty much eliminated right off the bat. There’s a learning curve in that, too, you know? I didn’t know that right away. Then you start turning in transcripts and stuff and you learn pretty quick."