Columnist Ron Kantowski: This dawn comes up a little cloudy

Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2004 | 1:42 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

Last week at this time, "that team from Gonzaga's league," which is the way most people will continue to refer to Saint Mary's until the NCAA tournament rolls around, was in Madison Square Garden playing two nationally ranked teams.

While that was happening, UNLV was trading jump shots against a collection of basketball vagabonds sponsored by a video game company.

That, more than anything, probably explains why Lon Kruger's UNLV coaching debut came up a little short in the auspicious department.

Again, in case you weren't paying attention to this space last week, don't be misled by the CYO school name. Losing 64-54 to a good Saint Mary's team that already has played six games isn't the disgrace that some in the impressive Tuesday night crowd of 11,550 will make it out to be.

"I would have rather played than not," Kruger said about the value of having some wins and losses under your belt at this time of year rather than only butterflies. "What we found out is that Saint Mary's was the better basketball team tonight. They got the best of us."

While the Gaels of Moraga, Calif., looked like a well-oiled machine after competitive losses to No. 23 Memphis and No. 11 Mississippi State in the Coaches vs. Cancer tournament, the Rebels weren't too slick. With the exception of committing four fewer turnovers and blocking most of the Saint Mary's shots that didn't find the bottom of the net, they were outplayed in nearly every aspect. Not terribly outplayed, but outplayed nonetheless.

Put it this way: When you allow a guy from France with a 1.0 scoring average to hoop it up for 15 points and 15 rebounds, which is what the Gaels' Frederic Adjiwanou got off the bench, you're asking for trouble.

And when you make only 1-of-12 shots from 3-point distance and shoot 34 percent from the floor, you're usually going to get it.

"We'll make a lot of shots that we didn't make tonight," Kruger promised, perhaps forgetting about Lou Amundson's dreadful touch from the free-throw line. Amundson was 2-for-7 at the stripe, but at least he was a lot more active on both ends than last year, finishing with 12 points and eight rebounds. I think he'll be just fine, provided all of his shots originate from a spot where he can use the backboard.

So much for the good stuff. Now the not-so-good, the kind of stuff that, were this not a season opener, you might label as criticisms. Instead, we'll just call them observations.

Outside of Amundson, these Rebels looked a lot like last year's Rebels, only without the fire on offense and within the belly that they showed toward the end of last season when Jay Spoonhour took over for his ailing old man Charlie.

Basically what Teaspoon did was roll the ball on the court and tell the Rebels to have some fun with it, and were it not for Nick Jacobsen's fade away buzzer-beating jump shot from Colorado Springs, it might have been the Rebels cutting down the nets after the Mountain West championship game in Denver instead of Utah.

Against Saint Mary's, which, hard to believe, was missing two projected starters, the Rebels didn't appear to be having much fun. Their best player, Odartey Blankson, spent much of the night sulking, perhaps because he couldn't master the intricacies of making a reverse lay-up. Blankson finished with 12 points on 5-of-15 shooting and missed several shots from in close.

The Rebels' Big Three of Blankson, point guard Jerel Blassingame and Romel Beck shot a combined 11-for-37. And outside of Amundson, there were no pick-me-ups from their teammates.

If you hadn't memorized their press clippings by now, it might have appeared that Kruger had recruited a bunch of role players instead of impact guys. Neither Joel Anthony, Curtis Terry, Ricky Morgan nor Dustin Villepigue did much to distiguish himself, although Kruger seemed to like the way Anthony and Villepigue, the big men among that group, mixed it up.

Maybe so, but to me they looked a lot like J.K. Edwards and James Peters, the two guys they replaced, only with a little more body art.

And yet, as Kruger noted, the Rebels were in the game from start to nearly finish. It was tied 48-48 with 5:18 to go before Adjiwanou scored on a lay-up and then a wide-open dunk out of the Gaels' half-court set when the Rebels had one of their few defensive lapses. That started a 10-0 Saint Mary's run that sent the hopeful half of the big crowd home disappointed and the impatient half home scratching its head.

This, you could almost hear the latter group grumbling, is not what the dawn of a new era was supposed to look like.