When the shots didn’t fall in the hoop Saturday for the Wisconsin men’s basketball team, they more often than not fell into the hands of a waiting Badger beneath the rim.

Then, sometime later, the ball would fall through the hoop for UW.

No. 14/16 Wisconsin (8-2) took down Nevada-Las Vegas (9-2), 62-51, by employing the deft shooting hand of reserve guard Ben Brust and dominating the glass all afternoon.

Brust led all scorers with 25 points on 8-of-9 shooting, including a 7-for-7 clip from the beyond the arc, which tied a school record. Forwards Jared Berggren and Ryan Evans, meanwhile, backed up Brust’s game with a combined 16 points.

UNLV guard Chace Stanback led the charge on the opposite end, scoring 16 points on 5-of-9 shooting.

The Badgers shot 37 percent on the day but nabbed 10 offensive rebounds while limiting the Rebels to five – the first of which did not come until over eight minutes had passed in the second half.

The job done on the boards helped the Badgers shoot 20 more shots than the Rebels, who converted 39.1 percent of their own shots. Wisconsin scored nine points off of those second chances as well.

“I definitely like the effort,” UW head coach Bo Ryan said. “The fact that they did not have an offensive rebound in the first half, I thought our guys did a real good job of getting bodies on people, because they’re (UNLV) pretty athletic, pretty bouncy and a very good rebounding team for the most part.”

“We got some offensive rebounds too because there was enough of them to go get. When you’re not making shots, there’s enough opportunities, but we battled them in there on the glass, I can take that.”

The Badgers had come out on the short end of the rebounding fight over its past three games against North Carolina, Marquette and Wisconsin-Green Bay, and to see UW getting its hands on loose balls more often than not was a welcome sight.

“It just kind of felt like we need to get back to controlling the glass because that obviously results in wins,” forward Mike Bruesewitz said, who scored six points and grabbed a team-best 10 rebounds. “If you look at stats, a lot of times teams that out-rebound usually win and offensively we just had guys going to glass and the ball bounced our way a little bit today. It was just a good team effort.”

And with virtually no second chances to speak of for about the first three-fourths of the game, the Rebels struggled mightily to crack the Badger defense. UNLV scored 32 points below its season average and turned the ball over 15 times, which UW turned into 19 points.

“Defensively, we locked into some things, we recognized some strengths of theirs, our players listened,” Ryan said. “[Assistant coach Gary Close] did a great job with the scouting report, the guys stuck to our rules 90 percent of the time.”

After a slow start that saw 17 points scored between the two sides after nine minutes, Wisconsin began to take off in the latter part of the first half, creating a 13-0 run that featured 3-pointers from forward Frank Kaminsky and Josh Gasser.

Wisconsin led by as many 19 after that and went into the locker room at halftime sporting a 13-point advantage.

UNLV continued to hang around in the second half, but Brust rescued an offense struggling to score efficiently. He hit four 3-pointers in a span of six minutes, rebuffing the Rebels’ attempts to turn it into a closer game.

The Rebels eventually closed to within eight points with just under four minutes remaining, but Brust sunk another three and Berggren added a layup to preserve an 11-point win.

Noticeably absent from the day’s scoring chart was senior guard Jordan Taylor, who provided just four points against the Rebels. Although Taylor has spent much of this season taking a backseat to scoring – and to, instead, facilitate the offense – Taylor finished the day 0-for-10 from the field, with six of those attempts coming from the perimeter.

Characteristically, however, Taylor led the team with six assists and gave credit to the UNLV defense, which constantly pressured him heavily.

“They did a good job of doing that, whatever they were doing, it worked, obviously,” Taylor said. “But … we got a lot of guys on our team who can step up and Ben did that today. If I go 0-for-10 and we win the rest of the games, that’s cool with me I guess.”