Hot-Shooting Pacific Hands Irvine Another Thrashing

IRVINE —  Grant UC Irvine this much. The Anteaters don’t lose the close ones.

No, when they lose, they lose --by 20, 30 points. There is no moderation in their margin of defeat.

The latest in their litany of losses is a 108-87 thrashing at the hands of Pacific in front of 1,907 Monday in the Bren Center in a game that Pacific won by halftime, taking a 66-43 lead after shooting 73% against Irvine’s porous press and half-hearted defense.

“It was a rout, an out-and-out rout,” UC Irvine Coach Bill Mulligan said. “If I could have hidden, I would have hidden.”

Irvine’s most notable success of the night was to somehow avoid being booed by a docile crowd that actually cheered enthusiastically for Anteater baskets in the final minutes.

“We were just terrible,” Mulligan said. “It was a combination of poor coaching, poor playing and a benevolent (Pacific Coach) Bob Thomason.

“Bob Thomason was really nice to us. It could have been a 40-point game.”

Irvine is 6-9 overall and 1-2 in the Big West Conference, but look at the losses. They fell to UCLA by 33, to Siena by 11, to Utah by 17, to Maryland by 14, to San Diego State by 14, to Stanford by 30, to Utah by 20 and to Utah State by 23.

The average margin in their losses is 20.3 points.

This game didn’t look as if it was headed that way. Irvine led by seven after five minutes, but Glenn Lavender’s dunks and Anthony Woods’ passes and outside shooting brought Pacific back.

The score was tied at 19-19. Then came the first Pacific blitz. First, an 11-0 run, its fierceness stoked by turnover after turnover. Irvine’s Craig Marshall had the ball taken out of his hands, teammate Jeff Von Lutzow lost one off a foot. On the other end, Pacific just kept scoring.

Dell Demps, the off guard, was the only Pacific player to miss more than one shot in the first half as the Tigers made 27 of 37 shots and seven of 12 three-pointers. Still, he had 13 points and nine assists by halftime, and finished the game with a double-double, 24 points and 14 assists.

Pacific’s sharp passing--the Tigers had 22 assists by halftime and 33 in the game--and Irvine’s passive press made stars out of Lavender and Glenn Griffin, who each scored 19 points.

Irvine went from being tied at 19-19 to trailing, 56-32. In the final nine minutes of the first half, Pacific made 13 of 16 shots, including three consecutive three-pointers.

But this is a team that led New Mexico State by 18 in the second half last week, only to lose by two points.

“The way we’ve been playing, no lead is big enough,” Thomason said. “We’ve screwed up a lot of leads this year.”

Not this one. The Tigers cooled only slightly in the second half, shooting 66% for the game.

In those often critical first few minutes of the second half, Pacific scored on a turnaround by Griffin, a three-pointer by Demps, another by Don Lyttle and another by Demps, going up, 77-45, before missing a shot.

Understand that Pacific (6-7, 2-2) is not a bad team, aside from the recent tradition of the school. Thomason, in his third season, has a talented, cohesive group that lost to Nevada Las Vegas by 20 points, which is a lot better than a lot of other teams have been able to do.

But for Irvine, it was a stunning loss for a team that keeps thinking it has righted itself, only to tumble again.

Irvine beat California last month by backing off its aptly named “suicide” press. But during the team’s four-game road trip, Mulligan returned to it, partly because teams were beating the new “soft” press for layups too, and partly as a tactic to stir his team.

It backfired Monday, resulting in more than one two-on-zero breaks and a variety of three-on-twos and three-on-ones.

“Our press failed us,” Mulligan said. “We really broke down.”

What next? The soft press or the suicide press?

“I don’t know what the hell I want to do right now,” Mulligan said. “I’d like to be like a football coach and say I haven’t seen the tape. What the hell, the tape’s not gonna do any good.”

Coming on the heels of a victory over San Jose State that gave Irvine one more victory than all last season, it was demoralizing.

“At this point I’m very down in my life,” Mulligan said. I heard some guy yelling, ‘Goodby Mulligan.’ I hear that now. I never used to hear it.”

The Anteaters get little time to dwell on the loss, not that they would want to. They host Fresno State Wednesday and play at Cal State Long Beach Friday.

“It was just a disaster,” Mulligan said. “The only thing we can do is come back and really play Wednesday.”

Anteater Notes

Point guard Gerald McDonald did not start because he arrived late for pregame meetings. He was replaced by Cornelius Banks.