A thunderous comeback made for a thrilling opener of the opening game of the 2026 Credit Union 1 Mountain West Men’s Basketball Championship, but the No. 9 Wyoming Cowboys fell just short of the No. 8 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels, who held on to advance to the quarterfinals, 73-70.

UNLV got out to a 13-point lead by halftime thanks to a dismal shooting half by Wyoming, which shot 12-38 from the field and 2-17 from 3. Wyoming came roaring back in the second half and took the lead at one point, but the Runnin’ Rebels found a way.

“I thought our late-game execution, which has been pretty good for the most part for a lot of this year. We’ve won a lot of close games. We’re 3-0 in overtime. We’ve won a lot of close games, so our late-game execution really was at a high level,” UNLV coach Josh Pastner said. “Obviously, this isn’t a plays game. It’s a players’ game. The guys next to me (Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn and Kimani Hamilton) got the job done, made big shots, and that’s just the bottom line.”

Which was particularly impressive given UNLV star Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn went scoreless in the second period after dropping 15 points in the first. The scoring load and playmaking had to come from elsewhere after Wyoming guard Damarion Dennis locked Gibbs-Lawhorn down.

Down the stretch, that came mostly from Kimani Hamilton, who Gibbs-Lawhorn told to take over late.

A wild turnaround jumper by Hamilton, along with some massive free throws in the pressure cooker — including two with two seconds left to take an insurmountable three-point lead — kept UNLV just out of reach of Wyoming.

“Earlier in the year, things just happened to go my way, but there are multiple people on this team that can do the same thing, if not better than I can,” Gibbs-Lawson said. “When you have Kimani playing more than 30 minutes a game, it’s going to be hard to beat us with how locked in we’ve been defensively. Walter Brown, Tyrin Jones, they made some big plays, blocks and steals tonight.

“(If) We continue playing how we played defensively, then I think we have a good shot at this thing.”

But perhaps no play was bigger than Tyrin Jones’s final of six blocks on the night: up a point with less than 10 seconds left, Wyoming missed a jumper and got an offensive rebound. On the putback, Jones rose to the rafters for a block on Damarion Dennis, who had a double-double and led the comeback effort. In the moment, the crowd pleaded for a goaltending call, but he got to the ball just in time.

To go with seven points and five rebounds, his six blocks were tied for the fourth-most in an MW tournament game.

“I was debating if I could try to have him pump fake twice, but he got it up quick,” Jones said. “I got just enough and I was thankful to get it out of the sky, then it ended up in our hands. … I just knew my timing was going to be enough just to get it right at that top, peak moment.”

The Runnin’ Rebels will meet No. 1 Utah State in the quarterfinals on Thursday.