Rick Scibelli Jr./Special to the Tribune

New Mexico senior guard J.R. Giddens has matured into his leadership role with the Lobos after a junior season spent in former coach Ritchie McKay's dog house. "It's great to see your best player get better. That only helps us," said first-year coach Steve Alford of Giddens.

Rick Scibelli Jr./Special to the Tribune

Giddens drives to the basket en route to a game-high 36 points in the Lobos' recent victory over Mountain West rival Wyoming. Giddens has shared player of the week honors in the MWC the past two weeks and has earned it four times overall this season.

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It's a verb now: YouTube.

J.R. Giddens is a name to YouTube. Punch it into the Web site's search window and a slew of grainy highlight videos pop up.

The first is titled "JR Giddens — former Kansas Jayhawk ('04)". The video is three minutes long, and its best clip comes from a nationally televised game against Michigan State.

The Big 12's all-time assist leader, Aaron Miles, hoists a lob from 10 feet behind the 3-point line. Giddens, a freshman at the time, comes off a screen at the free-throw line, jumps, clutches the ball and dunks it hard with both hands.

Cue college basketball's superstar announcer Dick Vitale, court-side: "Oooooh! Oooooh! Up, up and away! Yes sir! Get to know the name! J.R. Giddens! Get! To! Know! The! Name! He's going to be spe-cial!"

After all that yelling, Vitale gets only a moment to inhale before Giddens steals the ball from a Spartans guard and starts sprinting back toward his own hoop. As he's running, Vitale starts up again.

"Watch this! He's a high-riser!"

It's just Giddens and one defender, keeping pace until they're both about 5 feet from the basket. Giddens plants his left foot, skies with the ball between both hands, palms it into his right and puts down a dunk that makes Vitale's head explode.

"We're very familiar with YouTube," Giddens says now. "My favorite YouTube stuff is Tony Danridge. He's vicious."

(A Midnight Madness dunk contest between Giddens and Danridge — the Lobos' forward sidelined this season after breaking his leg — is a must-see. Danridge steals the show with a cradle-rocking, 360-degree, head-almost-hitting-the-rim eye-popper.)

"My father's not at the games, and he's not very good on the computer, so I get my little sister to show him," Giddens says.

Of the play against Michigan State, he remembers: "Coach (Bill) Self told me, `I wish you'd taken off from farther.' I probably could have, but I was a freshman and I could barely hold the ball up because I was so skinny."

Four years later, and two years after transferring to New Mexico, Giddens is a big (6-foot-5, 215 pounds), strong — he bench presses 260 — senior holding up an entire team.

The Lobos have made a staggering turnaround after last season's moribund 15-17 effort. Winners of four Mountain West Conference games in all of 2006-07, they've doubled that, with three contests left.

First-year head coach Steve Alford has certainly been a catalyst. But, Alford says, "I've always said it was about players. . . . They're the ones that pass it, dribble it, shoot it, defend it."

And Giddens is the one who's led the Lobos. Stats-wise, he's the team's top scorer (15.0 points-per-game), rebounder (8.6) and shot blocker (34, twice as many as the next closest Lobo, Daniel Faris). He has the second-most assists and is the only player in the Mountain West Conference to be ranked top-10 in scoring, rebounding, field goal percentage, assists, steals and blocks.

As Giddens goes, it seems, so go the Lobos. He's been on fire as the season rounds into a stretch toward March. The last two conference player-of-the-week awards have gone to Giddens, and UNM has won five straight. The team is third in the conference behind BYU and UNLV, teams UNM will face in its final two games at The Pit (Lobos' home record: 15-1).

"It's great to see your best player get better," Alford says. "That only helps us."

Last season, under coach Ritchie McKay, Giddens didn't help much. He put up similar numbers, but the team floundered and he was suspended twice for undisclosed reasons that remain a mystery. McKay said at the time the suspensions were a matter of "adherence to the pillars of the program." Before the suspensions, he was accused by McKay of "not paying attention to detail," an offense so egregious it cost Giddens starts and playing time.

A week after replacing McKay, Alford said of Giddens: "You've got a fresh start, but the chain isn't very long."

That short chain has gotten his star player to focus and become a different animal: a leader on a good team.

"In November, I was pulling him every five minutes," Alford says. "Every time he took a bad shot, I'd pull him. Those were lessons early in the season. Kids either learn from that or they make the same mistakes over and over again. To his credit, he's learned and he's getting more minutes and more shots."

The YouTube skills are still there, but Giddens has matured.

"I think I'm just trying to be a good teammate," he says, "believing in my teammates and coaches and trying to go out and give maximum effort and be on the same page as everyone. That's the goal of every practice, every game."

Whereas last season he would "run that trap all the time," Giddens says, he doesn't talk trash any more.

"Zero," he says. "Coach tells me to just shut up and play."

Giddens' growth comes from an Alford mindset that has intimidated the entire team into playing better basketball.

"I don't think anybody's talking trash," point guard Jamaal Smith says. "We're too scared to say something, because you don't know if Coach is going to get on you or not. We're focusing more on playing the game instead of trying to get the other team off their game.

"We're just worrying about ourselves. It's a totally different atmosphere."

The entire squad — freshmen through seniors — lives together in the dorms now. Each and every player says that's made them better friends and had a direct influence on the team's record.

"We're like brothers," Giddens says, "picking at each other and goofing around and then straightening up when Coach comes around."

Outside of study hall, practice and games, Giddens says he spends his free time shooting opponents online on XBox with Faris: "We're a nice tag team. Anybody who jumps on in the middle of the day can come get some."

Says Faris: "I've been playing longer than him, so I've got him a little bit in `Halo,' just like he has me a little bit in basketball."

You and the entire Mountain West.

"Everything's starting to click in coach Alford's system," Faris says. "When he's (Giddens) coming off screens and shooting, he's deadly. And when he wants to go to the basket you can't stop him. You've seen his numbers — he's playing unbelievable."

In the Lobos' last game, a rare win over Air Force in Colorado Springs on Wednesday, Giddens played five minutes in the first half because of foul trouble. The score was tied at halftime.

He played the entire second half and picked AFA apart with hard drives at the basket for layups, pull-ups and kick-outs to open teammates.

In those 20 Giddens-powered minutes, the Lobos turned a tie game into a 17-point blowout.

"If there's anything he's doing better than he was six weeks ago, it's driving the basketball," Alford says. "He's gotten much better at having a purpose in mind when he puts the ball on the floor."

Purpose. A disruptive teammate transformed. Last season, Giddens and the Lobos disappointed. This season, the team's competing for a conference title and Giddens is playing like an NBA draft pick.

Not that he'd say so.

"I have some thoughts on that," he says about his future in basketball, "but I'll keep them to myself."

"He'll be playing basketball," says Faris. "I don't know which team, but he'll be in the NBA somewhere. We'll be seeing a lot more of him."

It took his head a trying season to catch up with physical skills that dazzle on YouTube.

In another clip, Giddens puts the ball between his legs and dunks. He used that move against LeBron James in a high-school dunk contest.

Would Giddens, Lobos version 2.0, try doing that in a game?

"I've thought about it," he says. "But Coach is real strict. We'd have to be up by 40 points. If we're up by 40 and coach Alford's smiling, I might try it. I want to do it before my college career's over."

Says Alford: "He'd come out."

Even if you're up 40?

"He'd come out. This isn't a dunk contest, it's a game."

More than ever, the Lobos' best player understands that. And the team is so much better for it.