The Auburn forward’s navy blue shirt and white hat outlined what just went down, as he and the fourth-seeded Tigers just knocked off No. 6-seed Florida 86-67 on Sunday in Nashville for Auburn men’s basketball’s first SEC Tournament championship in five years.
People are also reading… “It helped us realize a lot,” Baker-Mazara said of Auburn’s tournament run. “I felt like it helped us realize we can be in a dogfight or we can be in a shootout. Whatever type of way the game goes, I feel like we have a lot of pieces that could do that. The first of those wasn’t a chance to avenge a losing result though, as Auburn was matched up with a South Carolina team it’d beaten by 40 points in the regular season in a matchup that favored the Tigers. They nearly repeated the first result, winning by 31 points to head into a semifinal matchup with Mississippi State; a team that handled the Tigers away from Neville Arena.
Hubbard actually scored more points and the Bulldogs still lost, thanks in large part to a much-improved scoring and a revived rebounding effort led by Chris Moore in the second half. It was a different style of win, but it proved the Tigers could come out on top in such fashion. And sure, the game plan was a focus on Florida’s guard. But the focus went beyond the individual matchups.
The difficulty only increases from there, as Auburn would see No. 1-overall-seed UConn in the Sweet 16 in Boston if the brackets go chalk, and conference tournament winners in Iowa State and Illinois would wait on the other side of the bracket as the No. 2 and 3 seeds.