BYU basketball: Cougars seek Vegas breakthrough

LAS VEGAS — Entering the season, UNLV was picked as the Mountain West Conference team to beat.

But, a little more than two-thirds through the schedule, five teams have already managed to do just that. The BYU Cougars, however, are not one of them — losing Jan. 21 to the Rebels 76-70 in Provo after leading by 13 at halftime.

Still, the Cougars are confident they can become the sixth MWC team to topple the Rebels when the two-time defending regular-season champions meet up with the preseason favorites tonight in the Thomas & Mack Center.

"We know that we can beat them, but we have to play our style for 40 minutes. We have to come out and play good basketball and be composed," Cougar guard Jackson Emery said.

Winning in Las Vegas has proven to be a difficult, but not impossible, task. San Diego State, the team the Cougars are tied with in second place with 8-3 marks, did it a few weeks ago. The Cougars, however, have won only 3-of-14 at the Thomas & Mack Center and have lost five straight there. In fact, no current Cougar has ever won there and senior co-captain Lee Cummard has lost all five games he's played there.

"I want to win every game just the same, but the fact that I've never won there is in the back of my mind," Cummard said. "But I think even more than that is for us to be successful and stay in this conference race, this is a big opportunity for us."

Obviously, five teams have figured out a way to beat the Rebels. But all five did it differently, which means there's not one particular method BYU can copy to get the same result. And the Rebels haven't been out of any game.

"Their losses in our league are really those last possession kind of things … they have played really well against everybody in our league. So when you try to find out by watching another team and how they attacked them, they've caused problems for everybody," BYU coach Dave Rose said.

The Cougars know they can beat the Rebels if they play as they did the first half of the Jan. 21 game, and they know they can't beat UNLV if BYU plays the way they did in the second half of that game — when they scored 27 points.

"The game was played at the pace we like to play in the first half, our defensive assignments were sound, offensively we were a lot more confident and a lot more patient. So what we need to do is duplicate that first half in both halves," Rose said.