Rebels hope to band together, start season turnaround vs. New Mexico

By Taylor Bern

Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016 | 2 a.m.

On Sunday afternoon, UNLV’s players learned that Dave Rice would no longer be their coach. A few hours later they were in the Mendenhall Center for interim coach Todd Simon’s first practice, proving that the season isn’t stopping, or even taking a pause, for the Rebels to catch their breath.

UNLV (9-7, 0-3) is back in action tonight at 7 against New Mexico (10-6, 3-0) in the Thomas & Mack Center. The game will air on CBS Sports Network.

Junior forward Ben Carter, who’s averaging 9.4 points and 6.1 rebounds per game, has been one of UNLV’s most consistent players and is considered by many to be the heart of this team. So what happens if the heart loses something during this transition?

“I came to UNLV to play for Coach Rice,” Carter said.

When Carter was playing for Rice’s brother, Grant, at Bishop Gorman High, it was BYU assistant Dave Rice that offered Carter his first-ever college scholarship. Since then the two remained close, even when Carter stunned the Rice brothers and his own father by originally picking Oregon over UNLV.

Now that one of his biggest reasons for returning to Las Vegas is gone, though, Carter is trying to lean on the other relationships he’s built and maintained over the last year and a half. This season could easily slip even further away from the Rebels if guys like Carter and sophomore Pat McCaw don’t rein it in, and that’s what Carter has his sights on.

“For me to not give my all the rest of the season and the rest of my career would be wrong, it would be selfish of me,” Carter said. “I’m here, I’m a UNLV Rebel. That’s who I am, that’s who I chose to be and that’s who I’ll continue to be.”

Senior Ike Nwamu didn’t envision any of this when he picked UNLV over UNR and Pitt for his final grad-transfer year. Now he’s trying to quickly pick up the pieces in order to finish out his career as positively as possible.

“It was a little weird,” Nwamu said when asked about Rice’s absence, “but at this point we can’t be too occupied by that because we have two big games this week and we’ve got a season to still play for.”

Nwamu and senior guard Jerome Seagears have 16 more guaranteed games at UNLV, and depending on how the coaching process plays out there could be several more players who have only that time remaining in their UNLV career. If enough eyes start looking toward different futures, the Rebels could find themselves in the Mountain West basement for a second straight year.

The easy part will be to come out energized tonight as they hunt for a first league win in front of what should be a decent home crowd. From there it could get interesting, as Simon attempts to fix and/or overcome the same issues (turnovers, missed free throws, long offensive droughts, etc.) that have plagued UNLV in its losses.

Part of coaching is managing personalities and agendas, and that task gets more difficult in a situation like this when enough has already been lost that it’s fair to wonder about individual motivations. Ultimately, only the players themselves will know what they’re about from this point on, and Carter is confident that the primary goal of winning as a team won’t change with the coach.

“We’re going to play the rest of this season for each other and for Coach Rice, because he was the reason we were all here together in the program,” Carter said. “It’s up to us to turn our season around.”

Taylor Bern can be reached at 948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Taylor on Twitter at twitter.com/taylorbern.