Under the Radar Games of the Day: 2K Sports Subregional/Visitor’s Bracket Tournament in Smithfield, RI
Siena vs Radford, 4:00 PM Eastern, necfrontrow.com
Prairie View at Bryant, 7:00 PM Eastern, necfrontrow.com
The premiere televised games tonight will be played at Madison Square Garden in New York City as Wisconsin battles Georgetown in the first semifinal of the 2K Sports Classic followed by Duke and VCU matching up in the second (third place and championship games will be played Sunday afternoon). However, four other teams also participated in this event, each playing a pair of road games at the four power conference schools before advancing to their own four team bracketed event at Bryant’s campus in Smithfield, Rhode Island today and tomorrow. The semifinals of this Subregional or Visitor’s Bracket of the 2K Sports Classic begin at 4:30 PM Eastern today as Siena takes on Radford, with the winner battling the winner of Prairie View and Bryant tomorrow (and the two losers meeting in a third place game).
The biggest storyline heading into this four team event is Radford, as the Highlanders were able to come up with an amazing double overtime win at Georgetown in one of the preliminary games of this event. Although they were unable to make it 2-0 by defeating VCU, just a split in those two games was notable enough to have this team as one of our key teams to keep an eye on throughout the season out of the Big South. Their semifinal opponent, Siena, did go 0-2 against Duke and Wisconsin, but still has enough talent that they could prove to be a sleeper pick in the MAAC. Just how good this year’s Saints team is may be shown in their games today and tomorrow, as winning this event would definitely get them the attention of the UTR crew here at HOOPS HD.
Bryant, the host school for this event, enters their semifinal matchup tonight at 1-1, having lost to Duke and beaten a non-D1 school (their second non-bracketed game of this event, at Georgetown, is scheduled for November 28). The Bulldogs are led by Dan Garvin down low, but will need to get scoring from their backcourt if they want to contend in the Northeast Conference this year. Tonight they battle Prairie View A&M. The Panthers are off to an 0-2 start, including a loss to VCU (they play at Wisconsin Wednesday). However, do not sleep on the SWAC this season, as the conference already has picked up 8 non-conference wins and enters today’s game as (amazingly enough) the #10 rated conference in the country by RPI (albeit RPI is fairly meaningless this early in the season), and has an overall win percentage better than 10 other leagues, including the West Coast Conference!
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