Miami » While Utah's Luke Nevill has been taking his parting shots around college basketball, his mother has been right there beside him, having taken time off from her job as a teacher back home in Australia to travel with the Utes and watch her son play the final games of his remarkable college career.

The whole family might have come, in fact, if they could have afforded it.

But Joyce Nevill might be watching that problem solve itself, as her 7-foot-2 son leads the Utes into the NCAA Tournament on Friday against Arizona at American Airlines Arena. That's because every basket, rebound and blocked shot seems to be nudging Nevill a little further into the national basketball consciousness and a little higher on draft boards around the NBA, where he seems destined to play next season for perhaps millions of dollars after finally shedding the label of college underachiever.

"I have a pretty good perspective on good bigs," coach Jim Boylen said, "and I don't see how he's not a first-round pick."

Increasingly, that's the consensus, even if several online mock drafts have yet to project Nevill going quite that high. Coaches around the Mountain West Conference have agreed that Nevill's combination of size and skill will be hard for pro teams to resist, and Nevill can do a lot more convincing with a strong performance in the NCAA Tournament, where many more eyes will be watching him than ever before.

"If you win and you're successful, you get more accolades and you get looked at more," Nevill said. "Teams at the next level want winners and want players who win games. The more you win, the better you get."

His blossoming this season into the kind of dominant force that coaches and fans always thought he could be already has attracted significant attention from NBA scouts, who have attended many of his games this season. One of them, while watching the Utes take on New Mexico earlier this season, scribbled a few notes in his scouting report and then wrote "Rik Smits," with a big circle around it.

Nevill could do a lot worse than inspire comparisons to the longtime center for the Indiana Pacers.

The 7-foot-4 Smits also was foreign -- native Dutch -- and played 12 years in the NBA primarily as a defensive presence with some impressive offensive skills for a man his size. Smits was seldom viewed as a star, but always a solid part of the Indiana teams that fared well with stars such as Reggie Miller around him, a role that seems entirely plausible for Nevill in the NBA.

"He helped his team, and I think that's the first indicator on how he has improved," said one NBA personnel director who asked to remain anonymous."That's a big, big plus. He's also not 6-11. He's 7-2 and he's gotten better over the last couple of years. Jim Boylen has done a terrific job coaching him. If he'll be patient and work at his game and get physically stronger than he is now -- and he's gotten stronger than he was a year ago -- then he's got a chance because he can catch the ball and he does have skills."

Though Nevill has been criticized for not being more aggressive -- "doesn't like to play against stronger players," according to a scouting report on NBADraft.net -- he has improved greatly in that area this season and can make his case when the Utes meet Arizona and 6-10 forward Jordan Hill, a first-team All-Pac-10 Conference star who's considered among the premier inside players in his league. If the Utes advance, Nevill could find himself facing Wake Forest's 7-foot Chas McFarland, one of the few opponents close to his size.

"He's put himself in position to be a first-round pick," Boylen said, "with the winning, with the competitiveness at the defensive end of the floor and with his improvement at the offensive end."

The coach has helped prepare Nevill for the flurry of activity that will accompany the end of the season, including choosing an agent and preparing for pre-draft workouts. Boylen has worked both sides of that experience, helping prepare players for it while an assistant at Michigan State and pursuing them as an assistant in the NBA -- "the guy making the call asking the trainer why a guy doesn't practice or whatever it is."

"If there's any indication from my phone being beat up by the top agents in the country ... the last three or four weeks," Boylen said, "those guys are usually pretty good at sniffing out who's going, and who's going high."

And Joyce Nevill?

She insists she and her family would never stake a claim on Nevill's future earnings, however lucrative they might be. What she knows is that -- from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas to Miami -- she is watching her oldest son take steps ever closer to fulfilling a dream he began chasing when he was a boy, and you can't put a price tag on that.

"That's what you hope for, for all your children, is to help them reach their goals," she said, "and I think any parent can relate to that."

mcl@sltrib.com