Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn scored 28 points, and Kimani Hamilton and Tyrin Jones added 20 and 18, respectively, as UNLV opened Mountain West Conference play with an 84-72 win over Fresno State on Saturday at the Thomas & Mack Center.<\/p>\n
The Rebels (5-6, 1-0) survived a roller-coaster wave of runs in which they built a 15-point first-half lead only to trail by two at halftime.<\/p>\n
They finally settled down in the second half and pulled away with a 14-4 run late in the second half to turn a 70-66 advantage into an 84-70 lead with 38 seconds remaining to secure the win.<\/p>\n
The Rebels trailed 41-39 at halftime after an almost inexplicable turn of events.<\/p>\n
UNLV opened the game with a 29-14 run in which they sank 83 percent of their shots from the field, throttled Fresno State (6-6, 0-1) with a ball-hawking defense that forced turnovers and challenged shots, and out-hustled the Bulldogs on the backboard.<\/p>\n
Eleven minutes into the game, the Rebels were headed toward an easy conference opener.<\/p>\n
Looks can be deceiving, though.<\/p>\n
As quickly as it came, it went away as the Bulldogs pummeled the Rebels with a 17-2 run to tie the score at 31 on a 3-pointer by Jake Heidbreder.<\/p>\n
The Bulldogs eventually took the lead 36-35 on a 3-pointer by David Douglas, then grabbed a 41-39 lead when Douglas banked in a long 3-point heave at the buzzer.<\/p>\n
The problem was obvious. Whereas UNLV began the game shooting 83 percent from the field, they slumped all the way to 52 percent shooting by the time the Bulldogs pulled ahead.<\/p>\n
UNLV also turned the ball over eight times, leading to 13 Bulldogs points. Fresno State\u2019s bench outscored the Rebels\u2019 bench 9-0.<\/p>\n
Gibbs-Lawhorn had 16 first-half points for UNLV, and Jones had 12.<\/p>\n
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.<\/p>\n
Contact Vincent Bonsignore at vbonsignore@reviewjournal.com.<\/a> Follow @VinnyBonsignore<\/a> on X.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn scored 28 points, and Kimani Hamilton and Tyrin Jones added 20 and 18, respectively, as UNLV…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":{"0":"post-103293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fresno","8":"tag-fresno","9":"tag-fresno-headlines","10":"tag-fresno-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}