On Monday the University of Nevada, Las Vegas named Lon Kruger as the new head coach of the men's basketball team. Kruger should enjoy the honeymoon he'll experience for a few months because, when the next season begins, there will be enormous pressure on him to recapture the glory that once marked UNLV men's basketball teams. UNLV fans -- including the program's influential boosters -- can be a tough crowd.
While it's been 12 years since Jerry Tarkanian last coached the Rebels, his long shadow of winning hangs over his successors despite his run-ins with the NCAA over alleged rules violations. Any coach of the UNLV men's basketball team will be judged, no matter how unfairly, by Tarkanian's success, including a national championship in 1990 and an undefeated regular season the following year before losing to Duke in the national semifinals.
Kruger's critics have noted that he hasn't coached at the college level for the past four years, and that during this period he had a disappointing 69-122 record as a head coach in the NBA. Nonetheless, the 51-year-old Kruger has had a solid college coaching record in 18 years, 318 wins and 233 losses, including a trip to the NCAA tournament's Final Four with Florida and to the Elite Eight with Kansas State.
We hope that Kruger can successfully juggle running a clean program -- as he has done elsewhere -- and one that also will win on the court. Kruger will go a long way toward success if he's able to bring back to the Thomas & Mack Center the excitement that was a hallmark of UNLV's teams during the 1980s and '90s.
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