LARAMIE – This is the time of year when tracking the "Brandenburg Standings" can provide a sense of where Pokes stack up in the Mountain West.
 
Legendary coach Jim Brandenburg, who led Wyoming to four WAC championships and three NCAA Tournaments, assigned zero points for home wins and road losses, one point for a road win and minus-one point for a home loss to create his standings.
 
The formula and goal for the Cowboys under first-year head coach Sundance Wicks is similar: Defend your home court, steal a handful of road wins and find yourself in contention for a conference title in March.
 
UW (7-5 overall, 0-1 MW), which was 5-0 at home during non-conference play and nearly pulled off a win in the conference opener at Utah State, hosts Nevada on Saturday at the Arena-Auditorium (2 p.m., MW Network).
 
"We're a hard place to get to, we have to be a hard place to win at," Wicks said. "That's just one of those things we talk a lot about is protecting your home court, having an identity that Wyoming historically has been 75% or better home court winning percentage."
 
The Wolf Pack (8-4, 0-1) will be desperate to pick up a road win after stumbling at home in its MW opener to Colorado State.
 
Nevada, which has wins over Washington and Oklahoma State, lost its only true non-conference road game at 68-64 Loyola Marymount.
 
The Cowboys also lost to LMU, 73-70, in the Cancun Challenge title game.
 
"That's why we went on the road to be battle tested and put our guys in different environments," said Wicks, whose team played Texas Tech in Lubbock and BYU in Salt Lake City. "For them to have only one true road (game), that's the way the world is going nowadays is everybody wants to play neutral sites, and nobody wants to play true road games."
 
The MW expanded the conference slate to 20 games this season to create a double round robin, which is why UW (0 in the Brandenburg standings) played an early road game in Logan and Nevada (-1) played a pre-Christmas home game vs. the Rams.
 
The Pokes closed out non-conference play with a 73-69 victory over Cal State Fullerton on Sunday. The players took a quick break for the holiday before reconvening in Laramie on Wednesday night.
 
Kobe Newton (20 points), Obi Agbim (16 points), Touko Tainamo (13 points) and Jordan Nesbitt (11 points) led UW to its first true road game of the season.
 
The Wolf Pack, the seventh most experienced team in Division I, features former UW shooting guard Xavier DuSell, who has knocked down a team-high 28 3-pointers and is shooting 43.1% behind the arc.
 
"I love him but we're going to treat him like an opponent," Wicks said of DuSell, who was a member of the Pokes' 2022 NCAA Tournament team when Wicks was a UW assistant. "We're going to guard him and try to take away what he does best. That's the part about knowing a guy is you know what he does."
 
Nevada is led by Kobe Sanders (15.2 ppg) and Nick Davidson (15.0 ppg). The Wolf Pack, which has five players listed between 6-10 and 7-1, is the fourth tallest team in the country and rank fifth in 3-point shooting (.416).
 
UW will have to be ready to defend Steve Alford's efficient inside-outside attack at a high level.
 
"This is welcome to the Mountain West, that's what it is," Wicks said of the matchup. "There's top 50, top 60 teams all over the place around here and we're fighting to be one of them. …
 
"I'm excited to see our guys test their mettle out there and see if our physical defense and the way we're defending the 3-point line can actually pay off here for us."
 
The Cowboys conclude the critical home stand against Boise State on Tuesday at the Arena-Auditorium (6 p.m., MW Network).
 
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