UFC Auckland bonus report: Hunt and Lewis get Fight of the Night on finish-filled main card

Last night, the UFC touched down in beautiful New Zealand for a second time with UFC Auckland.

In the card’s main event, we saw bona fide MMA legend and Kiwi hero Mark Hunt collide with streaking heavyweight contender Derek Lewis. Hunt would win this fight by punishing an exhausted Lewis to a fourth-round TKO.

In the co-main event, meanwhile, established middleweight contender Derek Brunson looked to rebound from back-t0-back losses against streaking Australian judo player Dan Kelly.

Elsewhere on the main card, we saw Dan “Hangman” Hooker score a crushing, knee-induced knockout over British veteran Ross Pearson, 23-year-old Moldovan light heavyweight score a quick knockout over Brazil’s Henrique da Silva, and Australian flyweight Ben Nguyen author an ultra quick submission defeat of recent flyweight title challenger Timothy Elliott.

If there was a theme of this UFC Auckland card, it was quick and emphatic finishes. As such, the UFC had a difficult task on their hands when deciding who to award with Fight of the Night and Performance of the Night honors. All the same, these bonuses had to find homes.

Fight of the Night was perhaps the easiest choice of the bunch. This bonus went to the main eventers Hunt and Lewis, who pelted each other with heavy artillery for the duration of their fight.

Performance of the Night winners, meanwhile, were undoubtedly more difficult to decide. In the end, however, these bonuses went to Nguyen for his submission of Elliott, and Hooker for his possible knockout of the year contender against Ross Pearson. Cutelaba, meanwhile, received no disclosed bonus for his execution of da Silva, while Brunson was also not given a bonus for running through Kelly.

What would your choices be for UFC Auckland’s Fight of the Night and Performance of the Night winners? Did the UFC get it right or would you have distributed these bonuses differently?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 6/11/2017.