No news is good news for short-handed Lobo men
Senior PG practices after suspension
Maybe it was a case of no news is good news for the Lobos after their Wednesday night road loss to Utah State.
Thursday brought with it an early morning flight home from Salt Lake City, by way of Phoenix, some class time and then a 3 p.m. practice for UNM’s Saturday game at San Jose State.
The good news for the Lobos (11-12, 6-4 Mountain West) as of Thursday night was that there weren’t any new announcements of player suspensions, injuries or other matters that would make the short-handed roster of six scholarship players who suited up in Logan, Utah, on Wednesday any shorter for Saturday’s game in the Bay Area.
But head coach Paul Weir also did not have definitive answers on whether his team will have any more bodies when the team boards its flight today for Oakland.
What we do know is Antino Jackson, the senior point guard who was suspended for one game for an unspecified team rules
violation, practiced Thursday and it appears likely he will be back on the court, though not as a starter, against the Spartans.
Weir will not say what Jackson did to warrant the suspension and would not comment when the Journal asked if it had to do with a physical altercation with a teammate.
More unlikely to play Saturday is junior wing Jachai Simmons, who was still home in New Jersey with family tending to matters related to last week’s death of his father.
Also unlikely to return Saturday are freshman center Vladimir Pinchuk (concussion) and Sam Logwood (shoulder injury/must meet unspecified team obligations). Logwood was again at practice on Thursday, as he has been the past week.
ONE FAN’S TAUNTS: Utah State head coach Tim Duryea reached out to Weir on Wednesday night and said he was sorry for what one fan in the Utah State student section was heard courtside yelling at UNM freshman forward Makuach Maluach.
The student, who was alone in his taunts and even had some fellow students yelling at him to shut up, yelled at Maluach several times “You look like a refugee.”
The student finally stopped after both his fellow students continued to tell him to stop and a Journal reporter sitting nearby in press row asked him to stop and informed him that, while it didn’t matter, Maluach and his family members were in fact once refugees from South Sudan who moved to Australia when he was younger.
A Utah State sports information department employee also talked with the Journal reporter after the game to try to get more information on the incident.
Weir said Thursday he appreciated Utah State trying to get to the bottom of what happened and said he didn’t want to talk more about it until he had a chance to sit down alone with Maluach to discuss the matter. MUM ON CONCUSSIONS: Asked Wednesday night to elaborate on the nature of Pinchuk’s concussion — as in how it happened or how long the 6-foot-10 freshman from Germany might be out of action — Weir made it clear he would rather not talk about the issue at all than have his comments potentially misconstrued.
“I don’t know. I really don’t want to comment on concussion stuff,” Weir said. “I think there’s been some stuff written about that — I just don’t feel comfortable talking about concussions. I don’t know how it’s going to get interpreted. I’m not going to comment on the Vlad situation.”
Asked if that included even saying when the injury occurred without getting into details of how or how it’s being handled, Weir continued his stance.
“I don’t want to say anything about it at all,” Weir said.
His reference to previously written articles on the subject are about a November article posted on NMFishbowl.com by independent journalist Daniel Libit who used unnamed sources to call into question Weir’s handling of the reporting of concussions with his players.