Opportunity knocks for UNLV vs. Hoosiers

LAHAINA, Hawaii — Part of the message from the time practice began for UNLV this college basketball season was about reaction.

How would the Rebels respond to success? How would they deal with adversity?

We saw the latter play out for the first time Tuesday in a loser's bracket game of the Maui Invitational, where the Rebels were thankful at day's end that their opponent was from Division II and couldn't deal with UNLV's size and athleticism over 40 minutes.

It just dealt with it for 34.

The outcome might have been different had that not been the case, but it was, and the Rebels woke up long enough to comfortably dismiss Chaminade 93-73 at Lahaina Civic Center.

What it means for UNLV: The trip here will be deemed a success only if it can defeat No. 13 Indiana in a fifth-place game today at 2 p.m. PST. The Rebels opened with a two-point loss to UCLA on Monday, and rare is the opportunity to earn those resume-building nonconference wins the NCAA Tournament selection committee considers significant.

The Hoosiers, picked second to Maryland in a stacked Big Ten Conference, definitely represent such a chance.

The parallels between UNLV and Indiana this season are more than you might believe given one is ranked and the other not, but both are teams with talent and depth and carrying high expectations for head coaches who need to win.

Tom Crean finds himself in a similar position with the Hoosiers as Dave Rice is with the Rebels: The NCAAs are a must, and any expected amount of success after that is up to the respective institutions.

"I think our kids want to do well and please our coaching staff, our families and the fans," Rice said. "It's not a bad thing. It's just a matter of making sure it's fun and we play hard, and understanding that good things will happen for us. The only pressure is to play hard and play together. If we do that, we'll have a successful season.

"I don't want our guys to have the weight of the world on their shoulders. That's my job, that's the coaches' job."

Here's the thing: UNLV is good enough to beat Indiana and other high-profile opponents on its nonconference schedule and contend for a Mountain West championship and return to the NCAAs for the first time in three years and, depending on how a bracket might fall in March, even win games once there.

But any pressure the Rebels might feel will be self-inflicted, given they haven't won anything, in league or the NCAAs, in forever. Why they would carry any additional burden this season — unless at some point they feel an inherent need to play for their coach — doesn't make sense.

It's difficult to get a true read on the Rebels through a 4-1 start, mostly because they have played only one team (UCLA) that matters. UNLV is every bit as athletic and at times explosive as we thought. It can cause some havoc with pressure, and its strengths are such that opponents will have a difficult time running away from them.

UNLV shouldn't trail Chaminade — a team I believe lost to Kansas on Monday by either 51 or 251 points — at halftime of anything, but it did by a 37-33 score and looked really disjointed and disinterested while doing so.

It's also true the Rebels scored 60 second-half points and were never danger of losing and were always going to impose their athletic will on the smaller, slower Silverswords.

The loss to UCLA was tough to absorb for a team that arrived to this season with more hype than any Rice has coached at UNLV, and it's certainly not a foreign concept for kids to have a difficult time moving past such a defeat and being ready to play 14 hours later against a team it knows is incredibly undermanned.

This stuff happens all the time. That the Rebels struggled for 20 minutes to get things going Tuesday is hardly an original concept.

You can be sure they will be ready to play from the opening tip today.

"Our team was really down after (the UCLA loss)," Rice said. "I think that's probably human nature. But you come (to Maui) as a group, as a team, trying to find out your identity, trying to see who in your program has toughness, who can bounce back?

"I think it would be easy going into the locker room (at halftime) and making it all about getting a pound of flesh. But confidence is a shaky thing. When you've got a group that came in, prepared hard and played extremely hard (Monday) and had things not quite go our way down the stretch and lost a game, there is a fine line between going in and blasting them and giving them confidence."

It was absolutely the correct approach, and anything different would have been counterproductive. Rice knew the Rebels would rally, knew Chaminade eventually would wilt, knew his team would win big, knew much bigger challenges awaited.

One arrives today against Indiana. Opportunity knocks for UNLV a second time this season.

It's important the Rebels embrace it every once in a while.

— Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be a heard on "Seat and Ed" on Fox Sports 1340 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Follow him: @edgraney