Photo source: UNLV Men's BasketballLAS VEGAS — The last time UNLV played Wyoming, Josh Pastner said he felt the walls closing in on him.
Not as a figure of speech. Literally.
The Rebels had just arrived in Laramie on Jan. 6 for their first true Mountain West road game of the season, and the trip went sideways before tipoff. Pastner said he did not sleep. The altitude hit him hard before the team even got to the arena. Some players needed oxygen before the game started. By the time the night was over, Wyoming had run UNLV out of the building, 98-66, in what still stands as the Rebels’ worst loss of the season. It was not just a loss. It was UNLV’s lowest net rating of the year at minus-45.0.
“We got thumped,” Pastner said Monday. “I was out. I mean, I thought the walls were closing in on me. I didn’t have one ounce of sleep. It was just awful. And a few other guys had some issues. They were needing oxygen before we even started the game.”
That game happened. It counts. Nobody inside the UNLV program is trying to erase it.
What the Rebels are saying now is something more specific: the version of UNLV that got buried in Laramie is not the one walking into the Thomas & Mack Center for Wednesday’s opening-round Mountain West Tournament game.
That is what makes this rematch interesting.
No. 8 seed UNLV enters Wednesday at 16-15 overall and 11-9 in league play. No. 9 seed Wyoming arrives at 18-13 overall and 9-11 in the Mountain West. Tipoff is set for noon, with the winner moving on to face top-seeded Utah State in Thursday’s quarterfinals.
For UNLV, this is not just a tournament game. It is a chance to revisit a matchup that landed in the middle of the most unstable part of its season and to show how much has changed since.
When the Rebels left Laramie in early January, they were 7-7 and still trying to figure out who they were. The roster was almost entirely new. Thirteen players had joined the program in Pastner’s first year. Injuries had disrupted the preseason. Roles were unsettled. Some nights the offense looked dynamic. Other nights it looked like five guys playing next to each other rather than with each other.
Photo: Guy Curtright / The Scarlet StandardThat team did not disappear overnight. But over the last two months, it has started to turn into something more coherent and, at times, more dangerous than UNLV looked at any point early in the year.
Since Jan. 13, the Rebels have gone 10-6. That stretch includes wins over Boise State twice, rival UNR, and two wins over Utah State, including a 92-65 blowout of the Aggies on March 3 at the Thomas & Mack Center. During that 16-game stretch, UNLV has scored at least 80 points 10 times, a clear shift from the uneven offensive version that was still surfacing in November and December. UNLV also went 10-5 at home this season, and the Thomas & Mack has looked much more like an advantage lately than a neutral backdrop.
Pastner has described the season the same way all year. This was always a rebuild. Not the clean kind, either. The kind that keeps moving while you are still assembling it.
“Guys have understood the system,” Pastner said. “Guys have understood what winning is like. To me, winning is more important than breathing. Winning that possession is more important than breathing. You don’t come in here and understand the culture until it takes time.”
That phrase, “it takes time,” probably explains this team better than anything else. Time to sort the rotation out. Time to build trust. Time to establish what Pastner keeps calling culture. Time for players to understand where they fit and what is expected of them.
It is why Pastner has kept returning to the same line for weeks now.
“I wish we could have November and December back,” he said Monday. “We are playing our best basketball right now.”
At this point, that feels less like wishful thinking and more like an accurate read of what UNLV has become.
The most obvious reason starts with Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn.
Over the last 10 games, Gibbs-Lawhorn has turned into one of the most dangerous scorers in the league, averaging 28.3 points while shooting 51.6 percent from 3-point range. He is no longer just UNLV’s leading scorer. He is the center of everything. Defenses build their plan around him. He bends coverages. He changes what help looks like. He has become the player who can rescue possessions late and tilt entire games with a scoring burst.
Wyoming did contain him once. In Laramie, the Cowboys held him to 10 points on 3-of-7 shooting in 33 minutes. That performance stands out even more now because of everything Gibbs-Lawhorn has done since. Over conference play, he has averaged 23.6 points per game while shooting 47.7 percent from three, both elite numbers in this league.
Wyoming coach Sundance Wicks knows exactly where the challenge begins.
“We’re going to watch UNLV versus Wyoming in the Mountain West Tournament with Bryce Hamilton,” Wicks said Monday. “Extremely, eerily similar usage. Bryce Hamilton was the guy who quadrupled everybody else’s shots on the team, and Dra hasn’t done that. Dra’s extremely efficient. He’s a lot more efficient than Bryce was, but the usage is still extremely high. They’re a very dangerous team, and you have to be ready.”
That is one of the most revealing things anyone has said about this matchup all week. Wicks sees the offense the same way everyone else does. It starts with Gibbs-Lawhorn. It may end there too if Wyoming cannot disrupt him.
But UNLV’s improvement is not only about one player getting hot. The Rebels have become more complete around him.
Photo: Guy Curtright / The Scarlet StandardHowie Fleming Jr. has grown into one of the team’s most important connectors. Over the last 10 games, he is averaging 9.1 points, 5.4 assists, and 1.6 offensive rebounds. Those are not headline numbers, but they explain a lot about why the offense feels cleaner. Fleming organizes possessions, pushes tempo, and helps stitch the game together when things start drifting.
His memory of Laramie is uncomplicated.
“I couldn’t breathe, bro,” Fleming said. “It was my first time playing in altitude like that. I just felt like we were real sluggish, real hesitant.”
That is not a concern Wednesday. The game is in Las Vegas, in the building where UNLV is 10-5 this season, where it beat Boise State in overtime in January, where it edged Reno 85-83 in late February, and where it blasted Utah State by 27 points last week. The building will be familiar. The legs should be better. The altitude excuse is gone, but so is the altitude problem.
Then there is Tyrin Jones, whose development has given UNLV a different kind of edge. Over the last 10 games, Jones is shooting 67.1 percent from the field and averaging 2.3 blocks per game. He protects the rim. He finishes around it. When March basketball gets tighter and more physical, having someone who can change shots at one end and punish defenses at the other matters.
Kimani Hamilton has added another layer during this stretch too, averaging 14.6 points and 5.9 rebounds over the last 10 games while shooting 41.9 percent from three. That kind of balance matters against a Wyoming team with enough depth to make things uncomfortable if UNLV falls into an overly Dra-dependent game.
Even in the loss at San Diego State, the Rebels showed why they believe they are different now. They scored 16 second-chance points, forced 14 turnovers, and shot 43.5 percent from deep in a road environment against a team fighting for postseason positioning. They lost 89-86, but scoring 86 points in that building against that defense was still another sign that this offense looks far more settled now than it did back in early January.
Wyoming, though, is not exactly showing up as a soft draw.
The Cowboys closed the regular season on a three-game winning streak and won five of their final six overall. They beat UNR 83-73 at home on March 3, then went on the road and beat San Jose State 88-78 on March 7. Over those final three regular-season games, Wyoming posted wins by 4, 10, and 10 points and looked much more stable offensively than it did during the middle of league play. That finish matters for a team that has been uneven for much of the year, especially away from Laramie. Wyoming is just 3-9 in true road games, but it is also playing its best basketball at the right time.
Wicks acknowledged that this rematch does not look much like the first one.
“From the last time we played them, they are a much different team,” Wicks said, “as we are.”
That is true on both sides. Leland Walker still leads Wyoming with 14.0 points and 3.6 assists per game and remains the biggest headache from the first meeting. Khaden Bennett adds 10.5 points and nearly five rebounds from the guard spot. Wyoming’s bench has also become a more meaningful factor during the late push, giving Wicks more flexibility than some teams in this bracket have. On the season, the Cowboys have also been slightly more consistent than their league record suggests, entering the tournament with a NET of No. 98 compared with UNLV at No. 111.
And that is what makes Wednesday a real test. UNLV may be the better team right now. The recent results suggest it. The offensive ceiling suggests it. The home floor suggests it. But Wyoming has already shown it can make the Rebels uncomfortable, and the Mountain West Tournament does not care what a team looked like two weeks ago if it is not ready for one sharp, desperate opponent.
There is also a larger weight hanging over UNLV, one that has nothing to do with Laramie. The Rebels have not advanced past the Mountain West quarterfinals since 2014. That drought has quietly followed the program into every March appearance, hovering in the background even when nobody brings it up directly.
Pastner’s message entering the week is as simple as it gets.
“You can’t get to the end if you don’t win the first game.”
That is where it all stands now. Wednesday at noon. Thomas & Mack Center. A rematch both teams insist should not be judged entirely through the lens of January.
Win, and UNLV gets Utah State again, along with another chance to turn a late-season surge into something real. Lose, and the memory of Laramie gets harder to shake.
For the Rebels, that is the opportunity in front of them.
Prove that night belonged to a different team.
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