Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Lewis fuels UNLV with career-best 24

The Rebels provided an abject lesson in crime and punishment Monday night.

While Kaspars Kambala and Trevor Diggs were doing penance for acting up last week at BYU, their replacements took turns punishing New Mexico in a 80-72 victory before about 7,500 at the Thomas & Mack Center.

Coach Max Good benched Kambala and Diggs for the first half and part of the second, but the Rebels got by quite nicely without their top two scorers.

With Jermaine Lewis making all five 3-point attempts en route to a career-high 24 points and Sylvester Dotson supplying 11 points, the Rebels led for all but the first few minutes to even their Mountain West record at 2-2 (11-7 overall).

Kambala was benched for his behavior in the final minutes of last Monday's 28-point loss at BYU, when he failed to join the huddle for a couple of timeouts after being taken out of the game. Diggs was similarly punished for telling the Sun that Kambala "quit" on the Rebels.

Good outlined the options for Kambala and Diggs in meetings with them last Wednesday.

"I told them they could sit out the first half, with their practice performance determining if they would play in the second half," Good said. "Or they could remove themselves from the team and be through for the year.

"Some people thought (the punishment) was too stern, because they were both remorseful. But we want to teach our players some life skills, and understanding responsibility to their team."

UNLV led 42-36 when Diggs entered to cheers with 16:03 to play, and 50-41 when Kambala entered to boos with 12:45 left. They helped preserve the lead, with Diggs scoring nine and Kambala seven, but that was beside the point.

The larger point was that Good firmly dealt with the mini-crisis without costing the team a victory. After their pratfall at BYU, the Rebels didn't want to stumble again on ESPN, but Good felt he couldn't let last week's incident go unpunished.

Diggs and Kambala both appeared enthusiastic on the bench, patting teammates when they came out of the game and participating eagerly in huddles.

"Coach told us what he wanted to do and we accepted it," Diggs said. "I said that stuff in the paper -- that was the wrong place to say it -- and I faced the consequences. I was a good cheerleader while I was out."

There was much to cheer, mainly because of Lewis, Dotson and Chris Richardson. The latter scored nine straight UNLV points late in the first half after New Mexico had pulled to within 22-20. The trio of usual backups combined for 31 of the Rebels' 36 first-half points.

Lewis broke out of a month-long shooting slump in the early moments. He scored 13 of UNLV's first 22 points, making 3-of-3 3-pointers. Two of his 3s came immediately after the Rebels outhustled the Lobos for loose balls.

Lewis was in a 14-of-45 slump in his last seven games, along with numerous turnovers.

"He's been buying into our system of our guards attacking the basket, but all it was getting him was a bunch of traveling calls," Good said. "He is a jump-shooter, and we told him last week to just jump up and shoot it."

The Rebels led by as much as 11 in the second half, but were never a threat to blow out the Lobos, who fell to 12-4, 2-1. New Mexico guard Ruben Douglas, a transfer from Arizona, kept his team in range all night, scoring a career-high 27 points on 11-of-18 shooting.

But Diggs finally shut down Douglas, holding him to only four points in the final 11 minutes.

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