UNLV ready for its second season

Steve Guiremand

Wednesday, March 17, 2004 | 10:15 a.m.

BOISE, Idaho -- Their NCAA tournament dreams were dashed in devastating fashion on Saturday night thanks to a last second 3-pointer by Utah's Nick Jacoboson in the Mountain West Conference tournament title game.

Two days later their popular interim head coach, Jay Spoonhour, was passed over for the permanent head coaching position when Lon Kruger was officially introduced as the school's 10th head coach.

Which begs this question as UNLV (18-12) opens NIT play here tonight against Boise State (21-9): Just what do the Rebels have to play for?

A year ago under hauntingly similar circumstances, the Rebels failed to even show up during a 85-68 home loss to Hawaii.

And as the team departed Las Vegas on Tuesday morning, two key starters, senior center J.K. Edwards and first team all-Mountain West Conference forward Odartey Blankson, failed to show up for the team bus ride to McCarran Airport.

They eventually arrived at the airport and flew with the squad to Boise. But neither practiced during a 90-minute workout on Tuesday night at The Pavilion and Spoonhour said neither will start tonight's opening-round game against the Broncos.

Both Edwards and Blankson seemed to be sulking when the team arrived for the workout. And when it became clear that both were upset and didn't want to practice, both were immediately made off limits to the media by UNLV director of media relations Andy Grossman.

Spoonhour called the incidents a "violation of team rules. They won't start (tonight). They'll be disciplined but they will play."

Call it the Utah hangover.

As irony would have it, the Rebels changed planes in Salt Lake City on their trip up, just a few miles from the University of Utah campus. And the main story in the sports page of the Salt Lake Tribune opened up some more bad wounds. It was headlined, "Running afoul?" and was about BYU center Rafael Araujo's recent series of physical confrontations, including his well-chronicled punch of Rebels point guard Jerel Blassingame on March 6 at the Thomas & Mack Center.

Blassingame just shrugged when shown a copy of the story. But the article did include an interesting quote from Jacobson who called Araujo "a walking cheapshot artist. He does something and then gets that innocent look on his face.

" ... He does things that can hurt people. He's a big dude."

Blassingame, junior guard Romel Beck and senior forward James Peters will be joined in the starting lineup by tonight by senior guard Demetrius Hunter and sophomore forward Louis Amundson.

"Some guys don't want to play," Blassingame admitted. "But we've got games to play. We're capable of winning enough games to get to (Madison Square Garden, site of the NIT's Final Four). I don't know why everyone is trippin.'

"We lost a game. The guy hit a tough shot. You win some and you lose some. You take the good with the bad."

Spoonhour felt the players who did practice did well, especially considering it was the first time they had taken the court since Saturday night's loss.

"Guys were ready to play," Spoonhour said. "Guys were excited and played pretty well and pretty hard."