Chop's play reminded me a lot of another former Rebel Jevon Banks. A defense-first spark plug that could hit an occasional shot and change the momentum of a game by doing all the little things.

Rob,

Just FYI Pomeroy no longer does any RPI at his site, he now does Pomeroy Ratings which he feels are superior when determining match ups.

The Blog with the commentary re: RPI

http://kenpom.com/blog/index.php/weblog/...

For RPI numbers, my favorite is definitely realtime RPI (www.realtimerpi.com) which updates every 5 minutes, so you can know just how good a win or bad a loss is nearly instantaneously.

And for those interested in MWC RPIs as things stand right now:

Utah 28
BYU 30
UNLV 53
SDSU 67
NM 104

Losses and wins in November still matter Rob, and a bad loss in November will still hurt your seeding come March.

This team will definitely get better but home losses against average to poor teams are going to dig you a RPI hole you can't get out of easily.

Here's hoping that Kruger can get the ship righted before we take on too much water, if you'll forgive the shipwreck allegory.

Go Rebels!

Cal is an NIT team, Cinci is a bottom tier Big East team. These losses are bad losses and bad losses hurt your seeding come march. It's the difference between playing Davidson or Wisconsin in the second round last year versus Kansas. Our RPI right now is 151, and Cal and Cinci's RPI is only going to go down from their current spots. Can't spin this, these losses hurt.

I just don't see anyone on the team with finishing skills except for DeShawn. Wink, Tre, Oscar, and Darris can all score off of drives but nobody has that above-the-rim athleticism besides Mitchell on this squad. Watch Cal hit about 4 or 5 alley oops while we're struggling to hit bunnies and double clutch lay ups. This team needs a slasher who will try to flush things in the worst way. But that's not even this offense's worst problem, that is that we have a very pro-style offense but without the skill players to make someone pay for things like overplaying the high pick and roll.

Mark my words: everyone is going to overplay the high pick and roll just like Cal and NCA&T did against us until we show that we can attack the basket off the pick. Either that big has to roll hard to the rim and have the guard feed him or we're going to see exactly what we've been seeing for the last 2 home games.

As a big on the pick and roll play if your man shows high on the double you HAVE to roll hard to the rim. Our bigs try to reset the pick in the middle of the double team which is the offensive equivalent of running into a wall again and again. It shouldn't be too hard a fix, but it's something that needs to be addressed ASAP.

Go Rebels!

Rebfan, relax on your chicken little routine; save it at least for when we, *gasp*, lose like we will several times this year, like every UNLV basketball team has done in the entire existence of the program. We have some serious room for improvement, but the sky isn't falling yet.

We always struggle against zone, and San Diego mixed it up, they played a 2-3, a 2-3 matchup, a 1-3-1, and a 3-2. Honestly it's the best gameplan to bring against us right now as we don't feed the post and didn't feed the post all of last year. We settle for threes and pass the ball around the perimeter.

To attack a zone you have to have good spacing and either feed the ball into the post, dribble and dish or kick out, or skip pass against the flow of the zone. We didn't really do much of any of that well this game. San Diego, even limited as they were with injuries and suspensions, are an upper echelon WCC team...a conference that as a whole has had a lot better post season success than the MWC has the past few years.

Take it for what it was: a tough win against a well coached very prepared (though understaffed) team from the top of a good basketball conference and lets get fat on some cupcakes!

Curtis Terry was a vocal leader who really became an important cog to both of our NCAA tournament teams. But he took some time to acclimate to his role at the point guard last year too.

But saying he played good defense is a bit of a stretch. He was serviceable but lacked lateral quickness and on-ball savvy...Curtis was a great offensive player his senior year, he hit huge shots over and over for us, however, nobody would confuse him with Marcus Lawrence, Wink Adams, or Corey Bailey in the on-ball defender department

Yeah, the new scoreboards are brutally bad...seems like we upgraded everything else in the arena, but downgraded those.

Agreed...eventually if the lawmen won't do anything about it, you have to take the law into your own hands.

Though i'm still not quite sure what he got T'd up for as i didn't see him running his mouth or anything like that.