Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004 | 9:34 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
There's a coaching axiom that says you can't coach height, although I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few former Indiana Hoosiers and Texas Tech Red Raiders walking around with stretch marks after visiting the weight room rack and stockade.
Basketball has become a game of inches in the Mountain West Conference. About six of them are the difference between the 6-foot-5 swingmen who are a dime a dozen in this league and the 6-foot-11 lumberjacks who wear Utah basketball jerseys under their flannel shirts.
When it comes to coaching, Rick Majerus is all that and a bag of (king-sized) chips. Based on the number of analyst gigs he gets after the Utes are bounced out of the NCAA tournament in the second round, he might even be a direct descendent to Dr. James B. Naismith himself, for all I know.
But when his guys can take the ball out of the peach basket by standing flat-footed, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of coaching.
Anybody who watched Monday's Utah-Rebels game at the Thomas & Mack Center will testify to that. If you don't think that 6-foot-10 Tim Frost, 6-foot-10 Andrew Bogut and, to a slightly lesser extent, 6-foot-11 Chris Jackson were the difference in the Utes' 72-67 win, check the rebounding stats.
Or their fingerprints on the backboard.
Utah outrebounded UNLV, 32-22. The margin might have been even more onesided had Bogut, a highly coveted freshman from Australia projected as an NBA lottery pick once Majerus teaches him some footwork, not gone into a shell after Lou Amundson sent one his left-handed runners back to the Gold Coast (the real one, not the slot and blackjack joint on East Flamingo) via a blocked shot.
On offense, Frost and Bogut combined for 22 points, which is modest for them, as their little buddy, 6-foot-4 Nick Jacobson, became Utah's go-to guy with 27 points. Jacobson hails from Fargo, but you didn't have to be as sharp as police chief Marge Gunderson to deduce how he kept getting open.
Seemingly every time the Utes needed a basket, Frost or Bogut or Jackson would set a screen that had roughly the same effect as the Berlin Wall. Utah's bigs might as well have had barbed wire strung between their shoulder blades, because the Rebels who tried in vain to guard Jacobson weren't getting through the Utes' Checkpoint Charlies.
Moreover, the ease with which Frost and Bogut were dropping the ball into the hoop on the occasions the Utes held onto it long enough to get the shots they truly wanted was almost comical, like when the big kid in the schoolyard plays keepaway from his chums. It was like Gulliver posting up on the Lilliputians.
What's scary for the Rebels is that the Utes haven't cornered the market on the Mountain West's big men. Brigham Young, for instance, features a 6-foot-11, 285-pound Sasquatch who answers to Rafael Araujo. Colorado State has its own Big Foot in Matt Nelson, who stands about 6-13. When healthy, as Duke discovered in last year's Big Dance, Nelson can leave his foot print all over you, too, only he does it with an soft touch around the basket.
Is it any surprise, then, that BYU, Colorado State and Utah were the Mountain West's reps in last year's NCAA tournament? And that most of the preseason publications have them ranked in similar order this year?
It's not that you can't get to the promised land with a smaller, athletic team, which is what the Rebels have evolved into during the past decade. UNLV hasn't had a monster in the middle since Elmore Spencer left in 1992, and even that's debatable. But in that Spencer spent six seasons in the NBA, he must have been better than most of us recall.
In the interim, the closet thing the Rebels have had to a space eater was Kaspars Kambala, who, when he wasn't fighting with teammates, was an outstanding rebounder. But Kambala was a power forward who only moved to the post when needed.
There also was Keon Clark, who, when he wasn't getting high, was an outstanding shot blocker. But Clark got most of his rebounds by default, and, given he was built like a No. 2 pencil, was not an effective screener. He couldn't wear guys out simply by leaning on them, as the current crop of MWC big men do.
This year's warm bodies in the middle are J.K. Edwards and Amundson. At 6-8 and 250, Edwards has the size to wreak more havoc in the paint than Leroy Niemann.
However, his game has the consistency of year-old latex enamel. Against Utah , it was Amundson, 6-9, who showed more aggression and tenacity under the boards -- in two- or three-minute spurts, anyway.
Frustrated fans often ask when the Rebels are going to turn the corner of NCAA Avenue and NIT Street, where they seemingly have been perched since Bob Maxson ran Tark out of town.
Here's what I'm going to start telling them: Hang out at Pete Newell's Big Man Camp, held every August at Cox Pavilion. Wait for a behemoth with "UNLV" written on his practice jersey to bump his head in the doorway.
Then keep your fingers crossed that the next three guys through don't have "Utah" inscribed on their shirts.
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