UNLV
 

Rebels lost last night to Valpo. Lots of TO's. Hope our pressure has the same effect. Would love to start this 5 game stretch with a road win.

No worries here. Just feels good we are playing our first road game. We should always do this, play a game that's semi-decent away but one we should control. Basically, any team from that conference but Nevada (if that's there conference). We had no business going into Xavier last year as that being our first true road game.

I like the fact we are coming off neutral floor games against George Mason and Ole Miss. The Ark.Pine bluff game showed me that we will play hard regardless of the competition. I think the Cats will be up for the challenge. We have roles established and some of the younger players have got their feet wet. I'm looking forward to this match up.

I am pumped for the game myself but it's still not a marquee matchup. It's game IMO we should still win by double digits, but still challenging enough to give us a test.

UNLV's taking the loss of 3 double digit scorers from last year a bit harder than we are so far this season. The strength of their team though lies in their frontcourt so it's important we play them tough inside and limit easy chances close to the basket. They're a bad 3-point shooting team (327th in 3 FG%) but they take about 19 3-point attempts/game so ideally we want them chucking it from deep.

They've played all of their games at home so far this year so the fact they've struggled a bit is very encouraging for us. They play in a big arena (17,000 seats) that they can't even halfway fill up (most crowds have been around 7-7.5k) so I don't expect the atmosphere to be too tough to handle.

I think a double-digit win is likely for us but at the end of the day any win would be suitable for a first true road game across 3 time zones.

Hope your right about the outcome but road games always make me nervous. Especially with traveling across time zones.

Curious on what the spread will be. I have been seeing we have a 70% chance to win on ESPN's game cast page.

2 things that could cause us trouble if things go south. unlv has the 18th best 2 point shot defense in the country and they have the 2nd best offensive rebound % in the country.



if there is one downside to how we play defense, we tend to give up a decent amount of offensive rebounds (we haven't been in the top 150 in preventing them since 2013).


things that look good for us, in fact very good. we are 10th in the country at turnover % on defense, they are 340th at TO% on offense. they are terrible at shooting 3's but pretty solid at 2 pointers. we are ok at defending the 3 and pretty solid ourselves at 2 point defense.



we should win, but we definitely can't sleep walk through it.



also the spread will probably be 4-5 points.

We play six of the 30 tallest teams in the country by effective height. UNLV is one of them.

1. UCF
3. UCLA
11. Miss St
24. South Florida
29. Tulane
30. UNLV

Are we on the list?