It has become a common theme around UNLV’s basketball team, this game-by-game analysis by others of Chris Wood. Of his production and attitude and effort and whether that eating motion he makes after sinking a 3-pointer is really necessary or, well, just another level of self-serving folly.
There is something magical about a small town. Something perfectly dreadful and yet charmingly nostalgic. The people of it understand each other, seemingly always straddling a line between love and hate, acceptance and resentment. Until heartache arrives. Then a small town unites.
I always loved this story about Jerry Tarkanian: It was shortly after UNLV won its national championship in basketball when a group of out-of-town reporters happened to be in the same restaurant as the Rebels coach.
The Chicago Bulls were a popular choice to win the NBA championship this season, but that all changed this week when star guard Derrick Rose suffered a torn medial meniscus that will require surgery. Chicago’s odds dropped from 8-1 to 20-1 at one Las Vegas sports book.
Cox Pavilion is a midrange jumper from the Thomas & Mack Center, but there was more pushing of the ball and guarding of the dribble and running of set plays in the small gym Wednesday night than we have seen in the big arena of late.
With his right arm in a sling, Kobe Bryant represents what’s wrong with the Los Angeles Lakers. He remains a big part of the team’s future although his best days are in the past.
In a season when UNLV was at least expected to hover in the neighborhood of the top in what has proven to be a second-rate Mountain West, things have sunk this low for the Rebels when talking positives: At least that 3-point streak remains intact.
It would be an easy assumption to make that any prep basketball team featuring a frontcourt with two McDonald’s All-Americans might breeze through its opposition with little resistance. Sometimes, it’s unwise to assume.
There’s something in the sports writer’s code, an unwritten rule, about not asking for autographs. When I heard that Jerry Tarkanian had died Wednesday morning, asking him for his autograph when I was a young sports writer was one of the first things that popped into my mind.
