Easy win can’t erase home loss to Wolf Pack

This was one of those double-scoop weeks for UNLV’s basketball team.

Or should have been.

It should have been like one of those times as a kid, when everyone does their chores and takes care of business and doesn’t dunk his sister’s head in the toilet, and you’re rewarded with a few scoops of ice cream to celebrate not setting the house on fire.

But the Rebels went and dropped a scoop on their jerseys.

They went and sullied up a good thing.

For the sake of the record, UNLV on Saturday night beat San Jose State 74-40 before an announced crowd of 12,623 at the Thomas & Mack Center, an expected result against the Mountain West’s worst team, against which the Rebels were 20-point favorites.

The Spartans have struggled so much this season — they are 2-14 overall, 0-4 in conference and are ranked 310 in the Ratings Percentage Index — that such a victory can’t even be judged as a legitimate response to the disaster that was Wednesday evening for UNLV.

You’re not erasing a home loss to UNR by beating San Jose State by 34.

How the Rebels ultimately respond to that 64-62 setback won’t be known until the coming week, when road tests against Boise State on Tuesday and San Diego State on Saturday await.

It’s an answer that needs to include better defense from UNLV.

Dave Rice spoke about toughness following the UNR loss, upset at his team’s lack of physicality when it comes to rebounding. He also warned that those who continued to play soft would pay for it by more trips to the bench.

Fact: These are the kinds of things a head coach says after a bad loss. A really bad loss. Had the Rebels won, Rice likely instead would have spoken about his team finding a way and persevering and overcoming its miscues. That’s what most coaches do.

As for sitting those in his normal rotation for a lack of effort, that has been said by Rice often over four years and yet never really occurred. Not to the level where players truly fear such discipline. I’m not sure what they fear.

More than toughness, however, the thing that hurt UNLV against UNR and has been exposed often in six losses for the Rebels is a lack of understanding defensive principles.

There is no better example than Marqueze Coleman’s game-winning shot Wednesday, when the Rebels failed to execute two elementary concepts against a simple ball screen at the top of the key, the most basic play in modern basketball.

A play run thousands and thousands of times each season across every level of the game.

Patrick McCaw went under the screen for UNLV, not the greatest decision with under five seconds left in a game, while Chris Wood didn’t hedge and bump the screener.

Wood instead remained flat, backed off and allowed Coleman to go left as a right-handed shooter and have a pocket to take and make the shot.

I’m not certain how Rice wanted his team to react there, how he told it to play the ball screen, if he wanted players to switch, which most teams would do in the final seconds of a tie game, but there is absolutely no way UNLV could have defended the play any worse.

Lazy. Just incredibly lazy.

This is UNLV’s main problem. It’s not anywhere near a good defensive team. Not against like or better people. It gets buried in the post by anyone with size, and while it’s nice to include that you rank second nationally in blocks in a notes package, those things tend to happen when you can’t guard the dribble at all and have good athletes on the back end protecting the rim.

Stats can be misleading, and many about UNLV at the defensive end are right now.

Defense is about commitment more than anything, commitment in the off season, in film sessions, in drills, in what you as a coach preach first and last each day, in why you discipline players. It’s not that UNLV coaches don’t know defense or can’t teach it — I’m sure assistant Stacey Augmon has much wisdom to impart, but he doesn’t talk to the media, so it’s impossible to gauge his thoughts — but the allegiance level to it differs from program to program.

Rice’s background is offense and those teams he helped win so many games with at Brigham Young were hardly considered defensive juggernauts.

Nothing changed in the big picture for UNLV this week. The conference is still average enough that the Rebels can very much contend for the regular-season title. Its NCAA at-large bubble chances shrank considerably with the UNR loss, but there remain a few opportunities to gain back some traction.

In a bad year for the Mountain West, UNLV remains as slightly flawed as any of the better teams.

We will see Tuesday and Saturday how the Rebels respond to the UNR debacle.

San Jose State isn’t a barometer for anything. It’s a single-scoop type of opponent.

It should have been a double-scoop week for UNLV, but things got all sullied Wednesday.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on “Gridlock,” ESPN 1100 and 100.9 FM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.