Columnist Dean Juipe: Rebels hit low ebb at Provo

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2002 | 10:40 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.

It's going to take some serious work, if not some mislabeling of the facts, to find a bright spot for the UNLV men's basketball team in the aftermath of a shoddy performance Tuesday night at Brigham Young.

Search deep into the box score if you like, but there's very little of a positive nature that can be said about the Rebels after this most recent loss. Beaten 60-47 by the Cougars, UNLV is now 1-3 in the Mountain West Conference and 8-7 overall.

If not for the fact the MWC tournament will be played at the Thomas & Mack Center and that these regular-season setbacks have the potential to be negated then, little if anything jumps out in a positive vein.

The Rebels have neither the look of an NCAA Tournament team nor one that's apt to be selected for the lesser NIT.

What they may be is worse than their fans anticipated: a second-division team in a conference of so little repute that it is apt to send only its champion to the Big Dance.

Producing little in the way of stimulating play during their stop in chilly Provo, the Rebels embarrassed themselves not only by losing their second game in four days but by failing to cover a seemingly generous 9 1/2 point spread.

Pummeled by 23 points at Utah on Saturday and then surrendering meekly at BYU is hardly acceptable. Where's the fight? The desire? The determination?

The answer: Each seems to be missing.

This was a game that was there to be won, especially with BYU throwing the ball all over the place and committing 20 turnovers. The Cougars may be a respectable 2-0 in league play and 12-3 overall, but they neither shot the ball well nor handled it with authority.

Yet it turns out it didn't matter, thanks to the Rebels scoring 28 points beneath their season average and looking passive about it.

Even good teams have bad games, of course, as proven by the fact the Los Angeles Lakers have lost eight times in 35 outings. But in UNLV's case the bad games are starting to become repetitive, and it can't all be blamed on a demanding portion of the schedule or the lack of a talented big man.

The Rebels have physical liabilities, to be sure. And no team wants to have its results married to its outside shooting fortunes. Yet some teams -- teams with grit, if nothing else -- at least make it a point to go down fighting, and that type of spunk was badly missing on UNLV's two-game sojourn to Utah.

Is it being too tough on the Rebels to say they "mailed it in" in both games?

If they didn't and if this critique is overly harsh, they have only themselves to blame. Any time your effort is called into question, something's not right.

Appearance counts, and the Rebels appear to have slipped into a midseason lull. They had a quickness advantage on BYU that they didn't exploit and only Dalron Johnson -- in the first half at least -- seemed intent on finding the basket.

He finished with a team-high 18 points but had only six in the second stanza as the Rebels watched a four-point lead at the break become a double-digit deficit.

Maybe it's just me, but I expected better.