Vegas Scores Another KO : College basketball: UC Irvine becomes latest victim of top-ranked Runnin’ Rebels, falling, 117-76.

It didn’t take long Thursday for UC Irvine to find out how good defending NCAA champion Nevada Las Vegas is.

Not that the Anteaters didn’t have a clue. Their 117-76 loss in front of a sellout crowd of 5,000 in the Bren Center made them the 12th team in 12 games this season and 23rd in a row to lose to the top-ranked Runnin’ Rebels, and they saw an inkling of what their fate would be during a 10-minute UNLV run in the first half. Put the emphasis on run.

UNLV didn’t run away with the game until the second half, when the Rebels turned a 13-point halftime lead into a blowout. The 41-point loss was Irvine’s worst this season, but it didn’t challenge UNLV’s largest margin of victory, which was 50 points over Nevada. The Rebels’ average margin is 31.9 points.

“They’re just magnificent,” Irvine Coach Bill Mulligan said. “The second half, they thought we were Duke. I told (UNLV Coach Jerry) Tarkanian just to mail the rest of ‘em in.”

Tarkanian wasn’t overly pleased with the first half.

“It seemed like every open shot, they hit,” he said. But UNLV turned up the defensive pressure in the second half and pulled away. Irvine shot 24% in the second half.

“We expected it to be a little closer,” Irvine center Ricky Butler said. “We got rattled with their defense.”

Larry Johnson had 25 points and 16 rebounds for UNLV, and he had his double-double by halftime, with 11 points and 10 rebounds. Anderson Hunt added 19 points, Stacey Augmon had 18 and Greg Anthony had 15.

Jeff Herdman scored 18 for Irvine, including five three-pointers and Butler scored 15.

Irvine had four-point leads twice in the first minutes, going ahead, 6-2, on back-to-back three-pointers by Dylan Rigdon and Gerald McDonald. The Anteaters also led at 8-4, but then Anthony made the steal that started a vintage UNLV barrage.

McDonald had just tried to pull in a weak pass when Anthony ambushed him with a slap steal and sprinted to the other end for a dunk, the first of many.

It was the beginning of a 31-10 scoring spree that was strewn with dunks and three-pointers. By the time the Rebels came up for air, their lead was 37-18 with 10 minutes 29 seconds left to play in the first half.

UNLV started the run by scoring eight points in a row. Hunt followed Anthony’s dunk with a drive and a finger-roll layup. Augmon dunked off a pass from Anthony, then Hunt made a steal and layed it in. George Ackles dunked one-handed inside off a pass from Hunt.

Herdman stemmed the flow with a three-pointer, but Hunt hit a three-pointer right back.

Irvine’s Butler got an offensive rebound and triple-pump-faked to make a basket from the lane, but on the other end, Anthony knocked down a three-pointer.

UNLV got another breakaway, and Hunt held up on the side, waiting for Augmon, who came down, took the pass and looking for a different way to express himself, hit a reverse dunk.

Before Irvine scored again, Hunt had hit another three-pointer, and the scored was 27-13.

It went on that way, highlighted by Augmon’s double-pump dunk off Hunt’s sling pass, and a final Augmon breakaway dunk off his own steal of a too-casual pass by Rigdon.

That left the score at 37-18, and UNLV didn’t expand that lead the rest of the first half, taking in a 58-45 lead.

That first-half run was nothing Irvine’s older players hadn’t seen before.

“Just another Rebel run,” Butler said. “I told them to try not to panic.”

Irvine had its moments. Herdman and Rigdon threw in their usual array of three-pointers. McDonald had one, and Cornelius Banks. So did Don May, a junior who never had attempted a three-pointer in his career. Now he’s shooting 100%.

Butler, at times, got the better of Ackles or Johnson inside. McDonald did a fair impression of Anthony with a furious full-court drive and slick pass to Craig Marshall for a layup.

But one team was one of the best ever, and the other was just another team.

Anteater Notes

A moment of silence was held before the game, and both teams wore American flags on their uniforms because of the Persian Gulf War. . . . Big West Conference members and officials decided in a conference call Thursday morning to proceed with games as scheduled. At Irvine, where there has been some campus protest, six additional uniformed security personnel were added for the game, although that was in part because of the expected sellout crowd. . . . UC Irvine Athletic Director Tom Ford joked with UNLV Athletic Director Dennis Finfrock about not playing the game against the top-ranked and undefeated Rebels. “Dennis, if you want to cancel it, we’ll take the forfeit,” Ford said.