Second-round action in the annual University Basketball Association (UBA) tournament began at the Fu Jen Catholic University in Sinjhuang earlier this week with the favorites winning their respective games on Monday and the underdogs pulling off mild upsets on Tuesday.
Top seeds in Group A, the Chinese Culture University (CCU), needed a big rally in the final quarter behind the strong play of forward Lin Jing-bang to erase a double-digit deficit in a narrow 68-65 win over the National Kaohsiung Normal University on Tuesday following Monday’s 80-59 trouncing of the National Taiwan Sports University at Taoyuan.
The win not only extended CCU’s winning-streak to seven straight (including five games in the preliminaries), but also put them in the driver’s seat to earn the No.1 seed berth in March’s final round.
Group B top seed National Taiwan Normal University also breezed through their first two contests in convincing fashion with lopsided wins of 107-43 over the National Kaohsiung Normal University on Monday and Tuesday night’s 91-61 triumph over cross-town rival Taipei Physical Education College.
Forward Lin Yi-hui and center Wu Dai-hao with 35 combined points accounted for a good part of Taiwan Normal’s total offense.
Defending champs and the third seeds in Group A, Fu Jen Catholic University, took advantage of a noisy home crowd to score a mild upset win over second seed favorites Hsing Wu College on Monday before Tuesday’s 95-78 victory over the National Taiwan University of Arts for their second straight win in as many days.
Pulling off the biggest upset win of the tournament so far were the National Taiwan Sports University at Taoyuan, whose 78-69 win over Hsing Wu on Tuesday gave the overall eighth seeds something to cheer about. Leading the way for National Taiwan Sports at Taoyuan on the night was power forward Wu Fong-sheng who netted a game-high 23 points and nine rebounds to turn back a frustrated Hsing Wu squad that remained winless after a solid 4-1 record during the preliminaries to earn a second-seed berth in Group A.
In addition to National Taiwan Sports at Taoyuan’s upset win over Hsin Wu on Tuesday, the Taipei Physical Sports College also came up big with a buzzer-beating putback basket by Hsu Wei-sheng to edge past the National Taiwan University of Arts in an 87-86 thriller.
They thus avoided what would have been an embarrassing loss for the most prestigious sports college in the country which won 155 games in a row at one point to accomplish the longest winning-streak in any major college sports in Taiwan.
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