If this were his first season as the University of Hawai'i basketball team's head coach instead of his 20th, Riley Wallace joked, "he (Matt Gibson) would be dead by now."

Thankfully it isn't and on a night when Gibson came off the bench and out of the doghouse to put the bite on Utah State with a game-high 20 points in a 69-61 victory, both the Rainbow Warriors' hopes for a winning season and their wild child point guard are still very much alive.

And Wallace could laugh about the ironies surrounding them. Winning will do that, especially for a team on the brink the way the Rainbow Warriors have been this Western Athletic Conference season.

For here was Gibson, benched after 20 consecutive starts, for violating one team rule, running down the court in the first half lecturing Wallace about another of the head coach's long-standing commandments.

Here was Gibson, who had overslept the start of Saturday's 10:30 a.m. practice, providing the Rainbow Warriors' wake-up call with 18 second-half points Monday night.

"Like I said, it is never dull with him around," Wallace said.

Monday night sure wasn't, not for the 3,746 on hand at the Stan Sheriff Center where the now-12-9 'Bows rode Gibson's hot hand to come back from a seven-point second-half deficit.

Not long after the crowd gave its football team, the Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl champions, a standing ovation for an impromptu halftime haka, Gibson began to put on his own show.

One of Wallace's paramount rules — in addition to showing up for practice on time — is that when somebody comes into a game off the bench, they don't, in his words, "let it fly the first time you touch that ball."

The thinking being that it takes time to get warmed up and get in the flow of the game. But when Gibson finally got a reprieve from his bench sentence and got into the game midway through the first half darned if he wasn't wide open for a shot. A shot he passed up.

So, Wallace yelled at Gibson for not taking it. And Gibson, on passing by the bench, reminded his coach of the dictum and his adherence to it.

Suppressing an urge to smile, "I told (assistant coaches Jackson) Wheeler and (Bob) Nash, 'He's right,' " Wallace acknowledged.

But it would be in the telltale second half, where Gibson scored 11 of UH's points in a critical 13-2 run where it, indeed, seemed he had all the answers. He hit 3-pointers, drove to the basket and, pumping his fists, energized a team forced to go "small" when its dominating big men found themselves in foul trouble.

"He did what he had to do to pick up his team and we couldn't stop him after he got rolling," said the Aggies' Chaz Spicer. "That's what good players do."

And, Monday night, as Wallace freely admitted, "That's Matt."

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.