Lack of discipline rears ugly head

So much has changed.

Wait. Another big is jacking a 3-pointer early in the shot clock.

So much hasn't.

Faces are different. The skill level has risen. Expectations are much higher, if that's possible in these parts.

Dave Rice coached while wearing a blue dress shirt, and UNLV's basketball team needed overtime on Wednesday night to beat Hickory High, which for some reason showed up at the Thomas & Mack Center wearing Dixie State uniforms.

The world has gone nuts, man.

The last time we saw UNLV play anyone other than itself, it was losing an NCAA Tournament game to Colorado that wasn't nearly as close as a 68-64 final suggested.

This time, the Rebels beat Dixie State 81-80 in an exhibition and - this is not a misprint - attempted 32 3s in doing so.

They did it against a Division II team that played admirably and was well coached and might have escaped with a win had Jimmy Chitwood not been back in St. George, Utah, with the flu.

Thirty-two 3s against Dixie State.

Well, OK then.

There is offensive freedom, and then there is realizing that a little responsibility comes with it. UNLV hasn't shown much of the latter in a long, long time.

The Rebels have the freedom part down, though.

They're free as birds shooting 32 3s against players that come up to their kneecaps.

"It's always important to score more points than the other team, but the bottom line is, we have a long ways to go," Rice said. "You saw tonight, we have a long ways to go. We have to get better, and it has to be in a hurry."

It's not head-to-the-dam-for-a-leap time. UNLV isn't traditionally sharp in exhibitions. Many ranked teams offer the same sort of lackadaisical results in these games. You see it across the country every year. The rotation is sporadic, the play is sloppy, the focus isn't there, the opponent is rarely as good and yet almost always plays harder.

It begins for real on Monday night against Northern Arizona, when a recent trend needs to change for the Rebels to create any sort of deep run come the NCAAs.

For the fourth straight March, UNLV was bounced from the madness in that loss to Colorado before any of the real craziness began.

For the fourth straight season, things finished far worse than how they began.

College basketball seasons are a drain. It's like standing in line to vote in Miami-Dade County, but for four months. There are ups and downs and twists and turns and more shifts in momentum than a night's worth of political tweets.

But being great in November and average in March won't help a Top 25 team achieve any significant goals, meaning it won't help it advance in the tournament.

That's the thing about Rice's second UNLV team. It has so many new parts, key players who have yet to experience the grind of a Division I season, that you would guess what we see now isn't close to what we will see a few months into a new year.

That's the scary part. Scary good.

There are reasons UNLV over the past four years has begun 8-2, 9-0, 12-1 and 13-2. Talent helps, and there has been a decent amount if it. The Rebels also have been well coached, and programs of their level can pad an early schedule with several winnable games mixed among tougher ones.

There also are reasons they lost five of their final nine last season, four of their last 11 the previous one, five of their last 11 before that and seven of their last 11 before that.

Whatever the cause, UNLV has not been at its best of late when it counts most. Lon Kruger's final teams were incredibly good defensively on early-season fresh legs but couldn't keep it up when the latter part of Mountain West Conference play arrived.

Last year, Rice's first leading his alma mater, the Rebels also couldn't sustain intensity for 40 minutes much of the season's second half.

When it came to road games, they couldn't sustain much of anything.

You saw a lot of that again Wednesday. Terrific for stretches, disinterested for others, focused one possession and lazy the next.

A 17-point halftime lead, only to be outscored 50-34 over the final 20 minutes and overtime.

The trend needs to be altered. There is too much ability, too promising a road ahead if the Rebels finally can learn how to finish what they start.

"We shot too many 3-pointers," Rice said after escaping Hickory High.

As for another obvious statement, he should burn the blue dress shirt.

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 98.9 FM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.