It wasn’t pretty, but the UNLV men’s basketball team pulled out a win over San Jose State on Tuesday at Provident Credit Union Event Center in San Jose, California.
The 77-71 victory was the Rebels’ second game without leading scorer Dedan Thomas Jr., while the Spartans were down three starters.
Thomas is out with a shoulder injury. San Jose State center Rob Vaihola and guard Will McClendon were both ruled out with knee injuries before the matchup, and starting guard Donavan Yap Jr. exited the game with an apparent lower-body injury at the 4:37 mark of the first half. He eventually returned to the sideline on crutches.
“You just had two evenly matched teams in the situations given that just battled like crazy and tried to try to win a game however they could,” Rebels coach Kevin Kruger said in his postgame radio appearance. “And we were just fortunate to come out on top.”
Jaden Henley led UNLV (15-13, 9-8 Mountain West) with a career-high 22 points.
Josh Uduje had 27 points for San Jose State (13-17, 6-12), which made a late comeback push.
Close one
UNLV had 14 turnovers in the game, which saw nine lead changes.
The Rebels had a 35-31 lead at halftime and had an opportunity to close out the victory without issue, as they led by six with 1:20 left to play.
But after UNLV allowed Latrell Davis to make a clutch 3-pointer, Sadaidriene Hall stole the ball from Jailen Bedford. Julian Rishwain fouled Uduje on the fast break, but the guard gave UNLV a break by missing one of his attempts at the line to keep the Rebels up 71-69 with 19 seconds to go.
With Kruger calling two timeouts in that final stretch, the Rebels were able to finish the game at the free-throw line.
“We just prepared and took those timeouts, because those are situations that (they) as a group have been in, with the five on the floor, and they did it pretty well,” Kruger said. “We learned, because we came out of one timeout and did pretty much the exact opposite of what we were hoping to do.”
Bouncing back
The victory marked a successful bounce-back game for Henley, who only had one point and three field-goal attempts in the Rebels’ last outing, a 61-53 loss to Colorado State on Saturday.
But it wasn’t just Henley who saw an improved performance. There were four other Rebels who scored in double figures. Jalen Hill added 17 points, Jeremiah “Bear” Cherry scored 14, Rishwain scored 11, and Bedford had 13 off the bench.
“Tonight was much better, and it still was far from perfect,” Kruger said. “We still got tired. We still made some decisions that were extremely head-scratching, but the percentage of plays we made that were really what we were looking for (and) where we wanted to get the ball so that that person could make a play or create an advantage, was much better than it was in the Colorado State game.”
The Rebels were 76 percent from the free throw line (16-for-21), an improvement from 7-for-17 against Colorado State, which Kruger credited to not bringing too much attention to the previous shooting struggles.
“It was nothing other than just a little bit of a mental block,” he said. “You want to be free, calm and relaxed in those situations. And we have good shooters.”
Kruger noted that a key adjustment was giving Hill more ball-handling responsibilities to take some pressure off Henley as he adjusts to the new role.
“When you lose a guy like (Thomas) with five games left, there’s going to be a lot of imperfections, and then there’s not a lot of opportunities for those live reps,” Kruger said of the offensive game plan. “So we’ve just got to break it down even more.”
Contact Callie Fin at cfin@reviewjournal.com. Follow @CallieJLaw on X.