History shows Rebels can turn season around

Steve Guiremand

Friday, Feb. 4, 2005 | 10:02 a.m.

The UNLV men's basketball team finds itself in an all-too-familiar position as the first half of Mountain West Conference play comes to an end on Saturday afternoon against BYU at the Thomas & Mack Center.

For the fourth consecutive season, the Rebels (9-9, 2-4) will hit the turn with a losing conference record.

Each of the previous three seasons the Rebels have gone 3-4 in their first seven MWC contests. They need a victory over a rebuilding BYU squad (7-14, 1-5) on Saturday just to stretch that streak to four years in a row.

The good news? UNLV has bounced back in each of the three previous years to have winning records the second half of conference play. And the Rebels advanced to the championship game of the Mountain West Conference tournament all three of those seasons only to be denied an NCAA tournament bid each year with crushing last-second losses.

So even though UNLV is coming off two less-than-inspiring roads losses at Air Force and New Mexico, history shows it may be too early to rule out the Rebels from still turning things around down the stretch.

"Yeah, we know that there's a long ways to go," junior center Louis Amundson said. "But I think everybody on this team has been disappointed in the way that we've been playing. We know we should have a better record than it shows and that we have a better team than that. We're disappointed where we are at right now."

"We know we can still get into the Big Dance if we take care of things now that we need to take care of in the long run," added senior point guard Jerel Blassingame. "It's still about getting better right now and not worrying about things like the conference tournament until it comes. We need to get better as a team right now before we can even start thinking about things like that."

The Rebels will be trying to rebound from an embarrassing 64-48 loss at Air Force on Monday night.

"It was a real miserable flight home," senior forward Odartey Blankson said. "Dropping both of those road games (UNLV also lost at New Mexico, 62-58, two nights earlier) was really tough."

But things don't figure to get a whole lot easier soon. Saturday's game against old nemesis BYU begins a demanding stretch that features four games in eight days, including a Monday night contest against No. 22 Utah and a Wednesday night home game against Big 12 foe Missouri. The Rebels then travel to San Diego State next Saturday.

"It's a tough stretch," Blankson said. "We've just got to come out and be prepared to play the games and just give it our best shots."

"This is a real important stretch for our team and our season," Amundson added.

Blassingame, who has been limping through practice with a bruised calf, said he's looking forward to the challenge of playing the next four games.

"I like to play basketball," he said simply. "That's what we all like to do here. To play games that close together I think is good for us. We just have to take each game and play it like it's our last."