To say Bruce Pearl missed coaching basketball is like saying Dick Vitale missed being away from the microphone to call college hoops on television after throat surgery.
Basketball
There are different kinds of wins in sports. Ones when you outplay an opponent. Ones when you don’t and still succeed. Ones when you make your owns breaks. Ones when the other guys break down. UNLV’s basketball team had another kind Saturday. “This was a character win,” Rebels coach Dave Rice said.
Chris Wood scored 16 of his career-high 18 points in the second half to carry UNLV to a 57-50 victory over Temple in the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic third-place game at the Barclays Center. Wood, a 6-foot-11-inch sophomore forward, also tied his career high with 13 rebounds.
Chris Wood and Goodluck Okonoboh played well for the Rebels Saturday night against Temple, and Dave Rice righted the ship after a bad loss on Friday.
UNLV is a 3.5-point underdog against Temple in the consolation game of the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic at the Barclays Center today at 4 p.m.
The UNLV women’s basketball team shot only 31 percent from the field in a 79-60 loss to Missouri on Friday night in the Rainbow Wahine Classic at Honolulu.
After all the difficulty UNLV had with Stanford on Friday night, it’s probably fortunate the Rebels will not be playing a top-10 opponent like Duke on Saturday. Not that Temple is an easy draw.
Anthony Brown and Chasson Randle, a pair of senior guards, took UNLV’s highly touted freshmen to school and introduced them to big-time college basketball. It was a rude introduction.
Is there such a thing as a season-defining moment for a college basketball team in just its fourth game? For UNLV, it will find out Saturday.
This is going to be a team that begins and ends with the backcourt performance. Friday night’s debacle is a prime example.
Charlotte Hornets forward Jeffery Taylor will not appeal the 24-game suspension handed down this week by the NBA after he pleaded guilty last month in a domestic violence case, according to a report.
UNLV is a 7.5-point underdog when they face Stanford in the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic at the Barclays Center today at 4 p.m.
History is pretty clear on this: You can’t begin listing the greatest Final Four games and not mention many — Magic vs. Larry in 1979, Texas Western and its all-black starting five vs. Kentucky in 1966, Jim Valvano looking for someone to hug in 1983, Villanova slaying Georgetown in 1985 — before reaching games between UNLV and Duke in 1990 and 1991.
It’s a story Goodluck Okonoboh has told countless times. He is fortunate to tell it, though, so he never tires of it.
There is a grand tradition among casual sports fans the day after Selection Sunday of scrambling to find information on college basketball’s smaller conference teams in an effort to decide which upsets to predict in NCAA Tournament games.
