Rebels can sell their pipeline to NBA

Kati Simon works at Green Valley High School. Years ago, when she was teaching in another state, one of her students passed on this wacky little nugget: A substitute teacher in his 20s told the kids he still planned on playing in the NBA, that he was dead serious about a professional basketball career alongside the greatest of stars.

Todd Simon, husband to Kati and associate head coach at UNLV, offered this response: "What? He doesn't even play at the Y."

The dream dies slowly for most, and some are tougher to kill than your everyday bark scorpion, but in today's world, aspiring to compete at the game's highest level remains prominent among the thoughts of those few with a legitimate chance and the thousands with less than zero.

But when it comes to selling the idea that preparing for such a jump would be best accomplished at a particular college, UNLV's coaching staff ranks among the finest nationally in delivering such a message.

Dave Rice and his assistants own the most important of factors in such recruiting wars: tangible evidence.

They hang from the ceiling as you enter the state-of-the-art practice facility that is the Mendenhall Center, not Rice and his assistants, but rather five long banners representing some of those leading players that developed their skills at UNLV and then began cashing large NBA paychecks.

The years range from Shawn Marion in 1998 to Rashad Vaughn in 2014 as bookends, with Lou Amundson and Joel Anthony and Anthony Bennett lining the middle. It is one of the first sights a recruit would notice upon walking into the building, and the importance can't be overstated.

Rice as an assistant at Brigham Young and now as head coach at UNLV has developed a national Player of the Year and NBA lottery picks, all at different positions and including a No. 1 overall selection in Bennett.

"Things like that and (the banners) are a tremendous help on the recruiting front, because not only were those kids successful, a few were really sort of Pied Pipers of their respective classes," Simon said. "They were immensely popular among their peers, so when they want to come here and then have the success they did, other guys take notice.

"There are a number of programs that have had enormous success but just don't produce NBA players. We've had a nice little run of it, and that matters to kids. The (NBA) comes up right away in recruiting. It's probably, from the perspective of an 18-year-old, one of the top two or three things on his mind all the time. It's their dream, and it sort of got the snowball rolling for us in recruiting."

No one has been on the forefront of selling the NBA dream to recruits the past decade more than John Calipari of Kentucky, and the fact that his teams have reached four of the past five Final Fours and delivered 18 first-round draft picks into the league since 2010 speaks to his mastery of this specific sales pitch.

Calipari has for the past two seasons staged an open practice for NBA personnel, and this year's combine-type setting in Lexington was televised by ESPNU. Other programs with potential NBA players are following Kentucky's lead, and UNLV will do so this week.

The Rebels on Friday and Saturday will host their own combine in front of representatives from at least 25 NBA teams, an exercise patterned exactly off what athletes encounter when invited to predraft camps. UNLV players will lift and be measured and test their shuttle time and vertical jump. They will compete in shooting drills and be watched intently by teams that could one day consider drafting them.

The practice part might be even more significant than how high a player jumps or how many times he can bench press a certain amount of weight. NBA scouts wouldn't attend countless UNLV workouts each season if the Rebels didn't have numerous bodies with substantial skill levels. Everyone knows certain kids can play, but how open are they to coaching and criticism? How well do they handle adversity?

They are questions that perhaps could be answered in a combine setting, yet another example of how Rice and his staff are forward thinkers when it comes to selling a program that does whatever it can to prepare players for at least a chance at playing beyond college, because somewhere out there, there is a substitute high school teacher who is convinced he still has enough game to make it.

"Everyone at some point believes he has a chance," Rice said. "That's healthy, as long as they keep it in perspective. We all reach that point where the end of the road comes in terms of playing basketball and it's time to do something else. That's why I want young people to enjoy the process and experience. The last thing you want is for them to look back, five, 10, 15 years down the road after it's over and wish they had enjoyed the college experience more. It's the best time of their lives."

And yet many (most?) spend a majority of it dreaming about the next level. Simon even heard a statistic that 17 percent of all Division III players believe they will one day check into an NBA game. Lunacy.

Fact: Only a select few make it.

The others turn into bark scorpions.

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. On Twitter: @edgraney