Columnist Dean Juipe: Season ends on sour note for Rebels

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, March 20, 2002 | 9:01 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

The diversity and balance that made UNLV a formidable basketball team throughout the second half of the season was on hiatus, and now so are the Rebels.

Reduced to what essentially was a two-man attack in their second-round National Invitation Tournament game with South Carolina, the Rebels saw their season come to an end in a 75-65 loss to the Gamecocks Tuesday night in Columbia, S.C.

A "Help Wanted" sign would have come in handy.

With only Dalron Johnson and Lou Kelly contributing points on any sort of regular basis, UNLV was beaten in a game it could have won. Dare I say it: This was a game the Rebels would have won when they were peaking just a couple of weeks ago.

But that's a wrap for this season and there's no begrudging the loss or the effort put forth as UNLV finishes 21-11. Charlie Spoonhour's 17th season as a head coach and first in Las Vegas goes down as an unqualified success.

The mere fact that Johnson and Marcus Banks were both sprawled on the floor in a simultaneous pursuit of a loose ball with 2:30 to play and the game pretty much decided was apropos. The Rebels, as they said in the Old West, died with their boots on.

But what is and what might have been are two different things.

What is: Kelly (28 points) and Johnson (17) accounted for an unnaturally high percentage of the team's scoring output, and that wasn't enough to offset not only their teammates' inaccuracies but a bushel basket of turnovers. Perhaps it was the travel, or the break from practice that Spoonhour allowed over the weekend, or the Gamecocks' defense, but UNLV handled the ball as if coddling it would lead to a plague.

What might have been: Had someone answered that Help Wanted call and taken the load off Kelly and Johnson, the Rebels would be within a victory of going to New York for the NIT semifinals, and their revised goal of finishing with a flurry and perhaps opening next season in the Top 25 would seem feasible.

Instead, they were eliminated by a lower-level SEC team that is only 20-14, albeit with a much higher Sagarin ranking -- 69 to 38 -- than UNLV.

I don't know, maybe the loss was entirely too expected. The Rebels hadn't played away from the Thomas & Mack Center since Feb. 18 and the oddsmakers obviously didn't see this as a winnable game for them.

Bettors here had what I thought was a grand opportunity to place a buck on the Rebels and come out ahead, as South Carolina was up at a minus 11. In truth, the final 10-point spread was only of slight consolation to those who put their money on UNLV, and it took a free throw by little used Noel Bloom in the final seconds to put an end to that mystery -- or was it misery?

The Rebels were in and out of the game on an intermittent basis, sometimes pulling back within a few points and sometimes falling behind by as many as 16. They were having trouble defending in the paint and they were firing the ball around as if they were a little too pumped up for their own good.

It was not the way they had been playing of late and it's not the way they wanted to end the season.

But that's the way it goes and now they can come on home.