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It’s only the first game

But a lot of it made me nauseous.

The attendance, atmosphere. Awful. That gross morgue feeling.

The defense. So slow to react, no pressure, easy buckets to a bad team. Switching was poor, close outs were poor. Didn’t force turnovers.

The offense. So unimaginative. Creates nothing. It seriously was similar to what we saw with Menzies, just no purpose. But to be honest, it was similar to last seasons offense which struggled, but we had some bailout guards.

This wasn’t being short some guys, this wasn’t having so many new faces. There’s some poor design out there and the effort was embarrassing. It’s very unpleasing to the eye. Losing always sucks, but the aimless style is just gross to watch.

Bright side, I can’t fathom that we will play any worse than we did tonight. Oh, we will lose, more than we like and we might even lose another team that is just as bad as Southern. But I can’t imagine us actually looking worse than tonight.

Avery Johnson probably threw a shot back tonight.

It doesn’t even hurt, it doesn’t even disappoint really. But it was very difficult to watch a team play such an ugly, ineffective style.

Tactical notes from Southern

Defense: Our help defense was lost. Notice on rewatching the first half that we had nobody to help early on dribble drive penetration and contain the ball. The ball screen defense was varied and inconsistent. They need to find something and stick to it hard. The switching was probably better than the hard hedge and chase over the screen but neither worked well due to execution. Here is a good style that could work by comparison on ball screens:

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This is a good concept for empty side ball screens. The effort on close outs was not great either but if you rewatch things our defensive rebounding killed us first half and offered up too many second chance points.

Offense: this is where it concerns me more. First off, we have no transition break for easy buckets. We don't run lanes and we don't push the ball with any pace. Its as if we are being told to walk the ball up. This happened a lot last year I recall. This loses us many easy chance buckets that can also get foul shots. Now if we walk up the ball with a good halfcourt offense than maybe we will be okay. The current sets were mostly move the ball around and post up Waley or Contrell. There was no off ball screens, no ghost screens, basket cuts, stagger screens for shooters and most of all we slow it down. By itself this would be the anomaly but from previous seasons we can see this looks like a trend. I like the coaches here and think they are good guys but this isn't working. Hell Bellermine would come in here and destroy us. We have no team identity right now. Based on that we will struggle unless things change. I have seen drills at practice and their shell defense drill is good and its a basic system but I don't know much about the offense. It looks farther behind than it should be right now.

common ncaa sets to run on offense

no middle vs forcing middle defense concepts

Watch these two videos for some ideas on how teams defend or use certain sets to get scoring. We do none of this right now. I think we are a "no-middle" team but its hard to tell watching us.

Run some Zoom action or Spain pick and roll for basic stuff. Curious to hear others on this.
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Pitiful Light Show

Attention Eric Harper.. attention Kevin Kruger… attention whoever is in charge of our light show… WAKE UP…. Immediately CANCEL the “movie presentation “ for our whole team to just stand around and look up and watch how great they are. Pitiful.. Secondly, who’s bright idea is it to dim the lights BEFORE they introduce the opponent?? Giving THEM a light show too. Stupid.. Ever since we started having a highlight movie during the light show we have had a horrible home court record. Go back to what MADE the light show..
1) introduce the opponent with lights on.. zero fanfare
2) a pause. .. lights go off.. announcer says “and now”
The fight song immediately starts with a bang
No boring one minute stupid movie please. Cancel it.

What is the likelihood

That UNLV is viewed more as a football school rather than a basketball school 3-5 years from now? I’ve noticed the excitement in the community around the football program and it hasn’t really accomplished anything yet, especially compared to MBB. Social media, mainstream media, talk among the community, it’s all at such a different level now and very different tone (as would be expected). But we’re approaching the tip-off to basketball season and there’s not much buzz at all even with CKK’s best team on paper. I always thought Vegas was a football town and just needed a winning team to get behind. Perhaps it is finally coming to pass?

Dedan

I don’t have a lot of positive things to say about the entirety of the game, but I saw something in Dedan. I saw a high school kid playing out there in the 1st half. Head down, slumped shoulders. That was a wake up call for him. I saw that same kid come out in the second half and collect himself. He controlled his pace, started drawing defenders and kicking the ball out, had an impressive lay in under the hoop, nice looking stroke. There is a certain patience to his game that we haven’t seen in any point guard for a while. Slow the roll on him. Let him adjust. Dude is going to be so good. As for the rest of the team? Not too sure.

UNLV Soccer

Men’s soccer won tonight at home against top ten Seattle U in the semis of the conference tournament. Advance to finals on Saturday at 1. UNLV is hosting so check out the final if you are in town.

If you want to watch the replay it is on ESPN+. Won’t spoil the details on how they won. Worth the time to watch if you like soccer.
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OT: OFF TOPIC Rebel-Net gamers out there - our Rust (video game) server is finally up

Fellow Gaming Rebel-Netters! (Seems the general forum is gone so I'll put this here.)

A couple buddies and I have developed a custom modded server for the game Rust and discord server for the server community. So for any gamers out there, if you already play and are looking for a fresh server, swing by and check it out!

There a few ways to connect, one is through the connect channel on our discord (https://discord.gg/mxsservers), our website also has connect buttons (https://rustpve.mxsgaming.com) as well as you can search Rust MXS PvE right from within the game under modded servers.

If there are any gamers out there, or people looking to just try something new hope to see you around! I'll probably be adding some UNLV skins too LOL!

Even if you don't play it would be a HUGE help if you could join the discord! =)


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Future Opponents

Interesting to see Creighton starting the season at #8 in the country. They play Iowa and Oklahoma State before us.

St. Mary's Starts the year at #23 and I think they want to join the MW. They Play UNM, SDSU, Boise and CSU before us. They also play Utah. They could be a good benchmark game to see how we may fair in conference play.

SDSU is #17 to start the year.
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start of basketball season

Personally, I am excited for this season. I think we will be a winning program and improve and potentially make the tournament. There are some stories in here as well. DJ Thomas coming on. Contrell starting to play for us. Jalen Hill back in Vegas. The boone twins hopefully making that impact we see from them. There is talent on this team I have not seen in many years. The schedule is soft enough to make some easy wins there allow us to develop chemistry for us.

I watched SDSU vs Fullerton the other night. I just think they are well coached and have a culture of defense better than most. looking at things from a business perspective we need to examine how the better programs have achieved success and what they did to make things work. Think of things in "best practices" examination. There is a team in D2 Bellermine university that is well coached and plays exceptional basketball. I saw a video breaking them down and how they they work it. They played washington recently and it was tough challenging game for them. They had the highest number of assists per team and passes per halfcourt possession. I might be wrong on the assist stat but they pass the ball a lot. In this time of dribble drive success its an anomaly to see so much passing.

Anyway, curious how many here are going to the game tonight.

From Andy McDonald to Seneca McKie..the name will live in infamy in my head forever!!

I am just freakin’ stunned.

We were supposed to comeback and win that game.

I was wearing my Rebel robe at the bar and I took it off at halftime annd went to the bathroom and the Rebels went to shit. most of the 3 fans that tuned in at the bar left at the 4th I put it back on in the 4th quarter and we made a comeback.

UNLV football..it just wasn’t meant to be.
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