Columnist Dean Juipe: Rebels short and this is no tall tale

Dean Juipe

Friday, Nov. 9, 2001 | 11:06 a.m.

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

Green Valley basketball coach Jim Allen looked out at the team in front of him on the court and remarked on its most obvious physical characteristic.

"My team's bigger than this," he said of his Gators, and he wasn't kidding.

Every team, it seems, is going to be bigger than UNLV this season, as Allen (and I) learned during an open workout that drew each of us to the Thomas & Mack Center. In fact, the Rebels are so short in the size department that they may be dwarfed by prep teams, such as the one Allen coaches.

Fans will be shocked at first glance, whether that comes at Saturday's exhibition game with EA Sports or at a similar exhibition next Tuesday or the season opener Nov. 17 with Wisconsin. This is likely the shortest team in UNLV's 44-year history.

"We're Muppets ... Smurfs," new coach Charlie Spoonhour admitted. "But it doesn't do any good to sit around here and worry about it. We don't have a waiver wire where we can pick someone up.

"We have to dance with who we brung."

This was not by design, Spoonhour confessed. Basketball having become synonymous with tall guys dropping the ball in the net, he wasn't looking to buck the trend and field a team of comparative midgets. Yet that's what has happened, at a most inappropriate time.

The Mountain West Conference, which always features big teams in Utah and Wyoming, has gotten taller with San Diego State, BYU and New Mexico each increasing its overall team size. As Spoonhour says, "The league got bigger and we contracted."

We were standing on the court as we talked, and I, at maybe 5-foot-11 on the days my vertebrate is perfectly aligned and absolutely straight, was at eye level with an alarming number of Rebels. I kept thinking the yardstick that was used to measure these guys for the team's program and media guide was missing a couple of inches, as the majority were closer to 6-foot than the 6-2 they are listed.

"There will be times this year when mismatches will be more evident," Spoonhour said, adding that on the nights when the Rebels aren't shooting well their height miseries will be more apparent. Then he added another foreboding thought: "I'm not as concerned about our overall lack of height as I am our lack of bulk. I don't know about our physical strength and I wonder about our ability to defend the interior."

Spoonhour's a lovely fellow, straightforward and friendly. He's also renowned for getting his teams to overachieve, and this UNLV team will have to overachieve if it wants to surpass last season's 16-13 record or make a shambles of the Mountain West media poll that relegated the Rebels to fifth.

Not that this is a bad team. At a glance, it's very athletic and likely sufficiently motivated with a new staff and enthusiasm.

Yet size determines the outcome of a number of games, and the Rebels are acutely challenged in this critical area. "We were going to push the ball anyhow, but this changes the way we'll play," Spoonhour said of going small.

But the Rebels' shortcomings have a silver lining, as everyone associated with the program agrees: Things are looking up.