Columnist Dean Juipe: Absences cost Rebels a victory

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2000 | 10:29 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.

This time Lou Kelly's absence, and perhaps Bill Bayno's as well, cost the UNLV basketball team a victory.

It's easy to say each man has only himself to blame for not being a part of the Rebels' tough-to-swallow 77-75 Monday night loss to Brigham Young University at the Thomas & Mack Center, yet both could point to extenuating circumstances.

Kelly is a mere college student attempting to transfer from a junior college to a university. The paperwork in the process has repeatedly bogged down to where his eligibility has been pushed back time and again.

After being advertised as okayed and ready for the game with the Cougars, Kelly was pulled from the roster moments before the opening tip-off due to still another administrative snafu and/or oversight.

Is some clerk, either at Los Angeles City College or at UNLV, sabotaging the process?

Kelly still hasn't played a game for the Rebels and they miss him badly.

Among the positives he will bring to the team is an outside threat to take the workload -- and the pressure -- off Trevor Diggs.

Diggs is also a junior-college transfer, albeit one who had all his grades in order before the fall semester. He has started all but one game for UNLV and while his scoring productivity has barely wavered, his touch certainly has come and gone.

He was a passable 5-of-12 from the field against BYU and he made a pair of crucial treys down the stretch, but Diggs can still be classified as in the midst of a grueling slump.

His point totals, including Monday's 20 to some extent, have been moderately deceiving.

For instance, in his previous five games Diggs scored 68 points while hitting only 25 of 85 field goals. His 15.9 scoring average is good but his .314 shooting percentage is awful.

He and the Rebels need for a couple of things to happen, and one of them is Kelly becoming eligible. Another: Shooters love coming off screens and picks yet the Rebels neither set any for Diggs nor seem to run any plays designed specifically for him.

At 6-foot-3 he's not really big enough to create space going toward the hoop and he needs the kind of help only a larger man setting a pick can provide. It's something for the team to work on, given that Diggs is going to continue to be counted on to score even when -- or if -- Kelly becomes eligible.

Maybe Bayno noticed as much while watching the game on TV and serving a one-game suspension for overlooking a mandatory Mountain West coaches meeting prior to the season. The fact that the meeting was held in Las Vegas only accentuated his boneheaded mistake.

He returns to the team today and has to share in the misery that accompanied a difficult loss. Despite an energetic crowd that tried to will the Rebels to victory, BYU was sufficiently poised to escape with a win in a game that figured to go to the wire with or without Kelly.

It wasn't the most artistic game yet there was a certain excitement to it and UNLV fans would have been thrilled with a win.

Instead it slipped away, in part because two men who would have played significant roles in its outcome were reduced to spectators by their own shortcomings.