Defense to decide if UNLV thrives

They have won and looked disjointed. They have won and looked terrific. They have won on the road. They have won without their leading scorer against a Top 25 team on national television.

Which means there remains just one task for UNLV’s basketball team: Get better.

Conference play demands it, because if everything to this point has been more SAT preparation, the Rebels now face the real test 16 times.

UNLV was picked to win a Mountain West Conference regular-season title in October, and nothing over the last four games suggests it can’t own such an honor. But nothing over the first 10 suggested league opponents should have considered the Rebels beyond ordinary.

The team that defended itself to victories against Arizona and Louisville would win the Mountain West this year.

The team that was handled at home by California and appeared average in beating Western Michigan would be fortunate to finish third.

“(Nonconference) is something you need to go through,” Rebels coach Lon Kruger said. “We didn’t handle the expectations as cleanly as we would have liked, but that’s human nature. It’s a hard thing to just tell them, ‘Handle it.’ You have to go through it.

“You’d like to be able to just flip a switch and handle everything well, but that’s not how things work. It’s a process. I thought we grew those first eight, 10 games and have (recently) played much better.”

Brigham Young and UNLV remain the class of this league, just as Utah and San Diego State are capable of hovering near or at the top, just as five others — including a New Mexico side that opens league play tonight at the Thomas & Mack Center — likely don’t possess enough to win a title over two months worth of games.

Records can be incredibly misleading at this point. Wyoming has 11 wins, but its most impressive result is an overtime loss at Utah State; San Diego State is 10-3, but the defeats (Arizona State, Arizona and Saint Mary’s) are against the three legitimate teams on its schedule; Utah beat Oregon and Gonzaga but fell to Southwest Baptist and Idaho State.

Explain that.

The one constant remains BYU at home, where today the Cougars put their 53-game win streak up against No. 6 Wake Forest. It is the one hurdle Mountain West teams with genuine championship hopes confront annually: Short of an outrageous occurrence such as a Big Ten football team ever again beating Southern California, BYU begins each January with eight conference wins.

Two things you can count on in Provo, Utah: The views from surrounding peaks are spectacular, and BYU against league opponents is more a sure thing than “American Idol” ratings.

“I don’t think it’s a situation where one (conference) team is clearly the best this year,” Kruger said. “I think four or five could win it and it not be a big surprise. It’s not like a North Carolina, where it might be unusual to see them lose.

“But the fact is, BYU will again probably be very tough to beat at their place. It puts pressure on the rest of us to win (at home) and match them. We’ve been able to do that the last couple of years.”

It’s not some difficult equation to solve when debating how the Rebels will win the Mountain West. They have the best coach. They have the second-best home-court advantage, which has seen UNLV win 24 straight against conference opponents at the Thomas & Mack.

They have a senior in Rene Rougeau who, if not the league’s best all-around player, certainly is as important to his team as any player in the conference. He is as critical to UNLV as Lee Cummard is to BYU or Kyle Spain to San Diego State or Luke Nevill to Utah.

The Rebels also have three senior starters with NCAA Tournament experience. It all makes for an impressive resume.

It also will mean nothing if they don’t guard as they did against Arizona and Louisville. Remember this: UNLV’s defense will decide how perceptive those October predictions were.

“We believe we can be (very good),” Kruger said. “Now, we have to do it. We’ve gotten past the part of expectations. That’s not on our minds anymore. We’re not going into games thinking we’ll always be OK. We know we have to play, which is a great lesson that came from those first (eight to 10) games.

“I don’t think any team goes into conference settled with where they are at. We’ve got to keep making progress and working. I haven’t seen anything out of this group to make me believe we won’t.”

They have what all teams covet and yet few truly enjoy: a real opportunity to win a championship.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at 383-4618 or egraney@reviewjournal.com.