Columnist Dean Juipe: UNLV tested but escapes CSU threat

Dean Juipe

Friday, Feb. 11, 2000 | 9:25 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@vegas.com or 259-4084.

The pace was never tedious yet it certainly qualified as deliberate.

The visitors were running diagonal plays and not attacking the basket.

Free throws, situational substitutions and timeouts were equally distributed and seemingly accentuating the ground-down tempo.

This was not UNLV's preferred style of play, but Colorado State was insisting on it. The Rams, with an almost biblical patience, were using up shot clocks and sticking to a singular strategy: Run as much time off as possible, then fire up a three.

But it takes all kinds to put together an impressive season and the Rebels, in spite of CSU's reluctance to gamble during its visit to Las Vegas, put a notch in the win column Thursday night at the Thomas & Mack Center even though the margin of their 74-63 victory was deceptive if not outright misleading.

It wasn't a flamboyant or an especially colorful game, yet the crowd was noisy, receptive, and, yes, thankful at the end, as UNLV withstood CSU's almost Princeton-ish approach. A game in which the Rebels were favored by eight points (offshore) came in at 11, and everyone left happy after what amounted to two hours of apprehension.

Bowing longest and deepest were Dalron Johnson and Danny Brotherson, who teamed for 31 points and compensated for the misguided shooting results that dogged the inside-outside combination of Kaspars Kambala and Mark Dickel. It isn't every night the Rebels can win a game when Kambala and Dickel finish 2 for 15 from the field, yet their misfires were soothed by Johnson's bounding energy and Brotherson's timely contributions off the bench, which included hitting all six of his free throws.

In terms of the big picture the Rebels had to have this game, and had they not won it there would have been a fatalistic tone to everything written about it. But the bell does not yet toll and UNLV is very much alive in the NCAA Tournament picture with the homestretch approaching.

There's even some talk of winning each of the remaining seven games of the regular season and adding the Mountain West Conference tournament title, and that conversation is not so farfetched now that front-running Utah is shorthanded and susceptible.

By the same token, those who have followed the Rebels this season and who saw Thursday's game are very much aware how tenuous the situation is. The Rams were in a position to win yet did not, due to too many fouls and something of a failure to keep the Rebels off the offensive glass.

But they did take the nation's fifth-highest scoring team -- UNLV trails only Texas Christian, Duke, Siena and Florida in average points per game -- and keep the final result uncertain until Johnson and Brotherson wrapped it up in the closing two minutes.

It was the kind of game where the winners leave with a sigh of relief, while the losers contemplate what might have been.

For UNLV it's six wins in its last seven games and an ideal time -- if there is such a thing -- to be facing Wyoming, Brigham Young and Utah within the next 10 days.

But the real upside of rebuffing CSU is the freedom it allows the Rebels and their fans to consider what good things may yet lie in store. In spite of the drizzle that awaited the crowd as it left the Mack, no one's spirits were dampened.