No. 8 Kentucky beats Arkansas for SEC title
De’Aaron Fox scored 18 points, and No. 8 Kentucky won its third straight Southeastern Conference Tournament championship by beating Arkansas 82-65 on Sunday.
NASHVILLE, TENN. >> De’Aaron Fox scored 18 points, and No. 8 Kentucky won its third straight Southeastern Conference Tournament championship by beating Arkansas 82-65 on Sunday.
The Wildcats (29-5) added their 30th tournament title all-time to their 48 regular season championships in convincing fashion.
The Razorbacks couldn’t string together points the way they usually do, not with Kentucky answering every big bucket with its own run. The big spurt came as Kentucky scored 13 straight points to end the first half and into the opening minute of the second that turned a threepoint lead to a 46-30 edge.
Arkansas (25-9) fell to 1-6 in this championship, having lost to Kentucky for the second time in three years. NO. 12 SMU 71, NO. 15 CINCINNATI 56 >> Sterling Brown scored 18 points to help send No. 12 SMU streaking into the NCAA Tournament with a 71-56 victory over No. 15 Cincinnati in the American Athletic Conference championship game on Sunday.
Tournament MVP Simi Ojeleye added 14 points, Jarrey Foster had 13 and Ben Moore scored 12 for Mustangs (30-4), who won their 16th straight game and second AAC title in three years. The Mustangs took the championship in 2015, but missed last year’s postseason under NCAA sanctions.
Jarron Cumberland had 14 points to lead Cincinnati (29-5), which has not won a conference title since capturing the Conference USA crown in 2004.
SMU started the year 4-3, but has reeled off 26 wins in 27 games. They went 17-1 to win the league’s regularseason title, with the only loss coming by two points at Cincinnati in January. MICHIGAN 71, WISCONSIN 56 >> Wisconsin’s Nigel Hayes sensed this Big Ten Tournament might turn out the way it did.
When the senior forward heard what happened to fellow conference member Michigan on its way to the nation’s capital — an abandoned takeoff; airplane skidding through a fence; trip delayed until the morning of the Wolverines’ first tourney game — he told his teammates on No. 24 Wisconsin about his inkling.
“I was like, ‘I think they’re going to play a lot better because of that. Because now they have this, like, ‘We almost died’ type of thing. So anything they’re worried about — playing well or trying to do this, trying to win the championship, trying to make the NCAA Tournament — is kind of taking a back seat to the fact that they have life,” Hayes recalled. “So I think they’re playing probably more relaxed and looser. It’s probably a blessing in disguise for them.”
As it turned out, Hayes was exactly right. The Badgers showed strong signs of recovering from their lateseason swoon until the second half of Sunday’s Big Ten title game, when No. 2 seed Wisconsin fell apart on offense en route to a 71-56 loss to No. 8 seed Michigan.
Bronson Koenig led Wisconsin with 15 points, but only two after halftime. Hayes and Ethan Happ each had 14.
Derrick Walton Jr. scored 22 for Michigan (24-11)
The Badgers (25-9) settled for their fourth runner-up performance in the league tournament — and the knowledge that, yes, they are capable of playing better than they did while losing five of six games down the stretch this season.
Before tipoff, both teams knew they would be heading to the NCAA Tournament, win or lose. It was more a matter of seeding and site for the Big Dance. The Big Ten final ended about a half hour before the start of the Selection Sunday TV broadcast.
Wisconsin entered having won three consecutive games, including Big Ten Tournament victories in which they held Indiana to 60 points in the quarterfinals, and Northwestern to 48 in the semifinals.
PRINCETON 71, YALE 59 >> Myles Stephens had a career-high 23 points and eight rebounds and Princeton won the inaugural Ivy League Tournament, beating Yale 71-59 Sunday to clinch its first berth in the NCAA Tournament since 2011.
Princeton (23-6) won its 19th straight game overall and didn’t lose in Ivy play this season. A day earlier, the Tigers overcame a 10-point deficit in the second half and topped Penn in overtime at the Palestra, the Quakers’ home court.
The Tigers have proved a dangerous opponent at times come the NCAAs. In their last appearance, they lost to Kentucky 59-57 — in 1996, they upended defending national champion UCLA.
Steven Cook scored 15 points, Devin Cannady added 13 and Ivy League Player of the Year Spencer Weisz finished with eight assists for the top-seeded Tigers, who pulled away in the second half.
Alex Copeland had 14 points and Sam Downey had 12 for third-seeded Yale (18-11), the Ivy champs last season.
After its third big dunk of the first half put the Bulldogs up 23-16, Princeton rallied to take a 31-29 lead at the break.
Stephens, the tournament MVP who set his previous career high with 21 points in the semifinals, scored 10 points in the first five minutes of the second half to push Princeton to a 47-39 lead.
The Tigers led by as many as 14 from there, shooting 52 percent from the field and hitting seven 3-pointers in the second half. Princeton students rushed the Palestra court to celebrate.
Until this year, the Ivy had been the last Division I conference not to hold a tourney, sending its regular-season winner to the NCAA Tournament since the league was formed in 1956.
Yale reached the tournament title game by knocking off its own biggest rival in Harvard 73-71 in the second semifinal. RHODE ISLAND 70, VCU 63 >> Jared Terrell finished with 20 points and E.C. Matthews added 19, including a decisive runner with 55 seconds to go as Rhode Island earned a spot in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1999 with a 70-63 victory over Virginia Commonwealth in the Atlantic-10 title game on Sunday.
The third-seeded Rams (24-9) never trailed and withstood a serious late push by second-seeded VCU (26-8) to capture their first conference tournament title since Lamar Odom led them to the A-10 crown 18 years ago. It’s the ninth time in Rhode Island history the program is going to the NCAAs.
JeQuan Lewis led VCU with 15 points and Justin Tillman had 10 points and 17 rebounds but VCU struggled to get anything going against Rhode Island. VCU shot just 31 percent (21 of 67) from the field and forced just six Rhode Island turnovers.