Mending Wallace keeps eye on long-range goals

“I’m excited to get back here pretty soon,” he said.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, the injured senior guard is not making a surprise comeback this season.

The Rebels desperately need a sharpshooter to emerge, but it won’t be Wallace, who is redshirting with a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee. If all goes well, he hopes to go through a full-speed practice within two to three weeks.

As usual, Wallace will be wearing a dress shirt and watching from the bench when UNLV (18-7, 6-5 Mountain West Conference) faces Air Force (13-10, 4-6) at 7:30 p.m. today at the Thomas & Mack Center.

“You see games where you feel like you could help out, but there’s nothing you can do,” he said. “It’s frustrating, but I’m out there rooting my teammates on.”

Poor perimeter shooting has plagued the Rebels for two months, and it was most costly Saturday in a 63-57 loss to No. 6 San Diego State. UNLV missed six straight 3s after taking a late lead and shot 1-for-15 for the game.

The Rebels rank last in the Mountain West in 3-point shooting (52-for-196, .265) through 11 games. They shot a miserable 2-for-33 from 3 in two losses to the Aztecs.

“You’re always going to have those bad days, but we seem to have had a lot of them lately,” Wallace said.

Now is when it’s painfully obvious how much UNLV was hurt by the offseason losses of Wallace and Matt Shaw, the team’s top long-range shooters.

Wallace injured his knee and had surgery Sept. 16. Shaw was suspended for his senior year in late April after failing a random drug test at the NCAA Tournament. Wallace made a team-high 61 3-pointers as a junior. Shaw, a 6-foot-8-inch forward, was the Rebels’ top 3-point shooter by percentage (.450, 27-for-60) and Wallace was No. 2 (.399).

“It’s always easy to talk about missing guys and what they do, especially with Kendall being a shooter. But there’s not any satisfaction in that,” coach Lon Kruger said. “Those are the breaks of the game, and we knew we were going to be without Kendall. There are not any excuses there.”

The solutions must be found within the active roster, because Kruger can’t make a trade for a shooting specialist and he’s not banning the 3-pointer from the offense.

UNLV, 9-7 after a 9-0 start, is hitting 30.5 percent from 3-point range through 25 games. Maybe that type of performance was predictable.

The team’s top six scorers among guards and wings — Chace Stanback, Tre’Von Willis, Oscar Bellfield, Anthony Marshall, Derrick Jasper and Justin Hawkins — combined to shoot 30.4 percent from 3 last season.

Stanback, a 6-8 junior forward, is hitting a team-high 35.4 percent (17-for-48) of his 3s in conference games. No other player is shooting better than 30 percent.

“I know that our guys can shoot the ball. It’s just a matter of confidence and seeing a few shots go in,” said Wallace, who made seven 3-pointers in a victory at New Mexico last season. “I’ve got all the faith in the world in our guys making shots.

“We’re struggling and people are thinking about it too much and putting a little too much pressure on themselves to knock a shot down.”

Wallace plans to graduate this summer with a degree in multidisciplinary studies and a minor in marketing, and then begin his Master’s work. He’ll return to spot up behind the arc next season.

In the meantime, he hopes to watch the Rebels shoot their way into the NCAA Tournament.

“We just need to play well down the stretch here and into the conference tournament, and hopefully our name is called on Selection Sunday,” he said. “We’re always making it tough on ourselves, there’s no doubt about that.

“It’s been a long five months, and I’m just anxious to get back out there and do anything full speed.”

Contact reporter Matt Youmans at myoumans@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2907.