Rebels looking to build on confidence against Air Force

By Taylor Bern

Saturday, Jan. 16, 2016 | 2 a.m.

The Rebels aren’t happy that Dave Rice was pushed out less than a week ago, but entering their second game without him it might be accurate to say they are relieved. Senior guard Jerome Seagears said the players were generally aware of the situation their coach was in, and Seagears thought it led directly to the on-court struggles that ultimately cost Rice his job midway through his fifth season.

“I think guys on the team just felt the pressure,” Seagears said. “They probably just felt the pressure of the coaching staff, and probably coaching a little bit tighter so guys are playing a little bit tighter. Now, you kind of dropped the bomb so guys are like, ‘Well, we’re already at rock bottom so what else? Just play from there.’ ”

UNLV’s 2015-16 season is going to be a case study in what happens when a seemingly capable team that has underperformed releases the pressure valve halfway through a year. Example No. 2 comes tonight at 7 in the Thomas & Mack Center against Air Force (10-7, 1-3) on ESPN3.

The Rebels (10-7, 1-3) played one of their best games of the season on Tuesday in interim coach Todd Simon’s college coaching debut, a 12-point home victory against New Mexico. The keys were turning up the full-court pressure that UNLV spent so much time working on during the offseason and limiting the turnover problems that had become an epidemic in Mountain West play.

“They played extremely hard,” Simon said. “I think getting the pressure back turned up, a re-emphasis on it, was really good for their energy. They knew exactly what we were going to look for.”

Simon encouraged a free-form offense in the first 10 seconds of the shot clock to encourage transition opportunities and left lineups on the court for longer stretches of time. UNLV also hit 27-of-33 at the free-throw line after averaging 57 percent over the previous two losses.

If the Rebels had shot like that at the free-throw line or committed only seven turnovers, as they did against New Mexico, instead of the 19 they were averaging in league play then this coaching change probably doesn’t occur and UNLV might even have been 3-0. But that’s not what happened, and whether or not people agree with the administration’s decision to make a coaching change, that is what happened.

Rice exited with the remaining three-plus years of his base salary and is likely to land on his feet. BYU coach Dave Rose has already floated the possibility of his former assistant helping in some capacity yet this season.

So while Rice will be OK, it’s impossible to predict what direction his former team will go. The first result was promising, but was that more the emotion of a team that lost its coach two days beforehand or something on-court like enforcing pace?

Some of it was simply a regression to the mean because every metric suggested that the Rebels were better than how they were playing. But there’s also something to Rice gradually backing off the pressure style that he had hammered home for months.

“At times yeah, it kind of slowed us down,” sophomore guard Pat McCaw said. “That’s not our style of play. Sometimes we would try to say we need to press more.”

By the end of Rice’s tenure, the Rebels were slow and their confidence was shot. Each missed shot or free throw or turnover threw another brick onto the weight they were carrying, and those bricks seemed to grow exponentially.

“Everybody knew what was kind of up, so it was like guys didn’t want to be the one to mess something up,” Seagears said. “Everybody knows we don’t turn the ball over like that.”

Once they got the news on Sunday, that weight vanished. They had been playing to win, and by extension to save their coach’s job, and when that failed they were left with a sadness that has turned into us against the world-type motivation.

“Losing somebody like that, it hits you close to home because Coach Rice was like a father to most of us and everybody respected him,” McCaw said. “Losing him midseason kind of fueled people’s fires. People were upset by it and I think that brought different mentalities to everybody on our team. Everybody is playing with a chip on their shoulders.”

Do those mentalities travel on the road with the Rebels next week and the rest of the season? Will UNLV again shrivel in the final five minutes of a close game or has one game restored the confidence that was destroyed over a month?

The answers will determine what kind of team this really is, though the players feel like they already have it figured out. They’re the team with nothing to lose.

“We were already at the bottom,” Seagears said. “Coach Rice is our guy, he always will be, he’s a great person. He was put in a situation where the pressure was kind of getting to everybody, and guys (against New Mexico) were able to play with confidence because they know what else can happen from here.”

UNLV’s preseason marketing theme has morphed from a pronouncement to a question that will define a season and potentially two coaches: And Now?

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