It wasn’t the best week in the world for the MAAC, but a small pack of teams are starting to separate themselves as legitimate title contenders as the season continues. Iona, Loyola (MD) and Fairfield look to be the class of the league right now as Manhattan has struggled against a difficult schedule. Continue reading “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as MAAC Opens Conference Play”
Category: Saint Peter’s
Dunne, St. Peter’s looking to beat expectations
On March 7, 2011 John Dunne and St. Peter’s were on top of the MAAC, celebrating their first championship since 1995 with a five-point win over Iona.
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Tempo-free MAAC: The consistent contender
There’s one team in the MAAC that has been fairly consistent this season. It’s not Iona. It’s not Manhattan. It’s Loyola (MD). The Greyhounds have played at about the same level all season as they’ve compiled a 10-2 record to tie the Gaels atop the conference standings. Jimmy Patsos has his team limiting the ups and down and thus limiting the ways they can lose games. Their variance is half of anyone else in the league. (Just don’t ask how the Niagara game happened.)
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Tempo-free MAAC: Iona still in drivers seat
Iona may have lost a last-second game to Manhattan, but the Gaels are definitely still the team to beat in the MAAC. Iona is the top team in the league in efficiency margin, but it comes with a bit of a caveat, the Gaels have also played one of the easiest schedules in the conference thus far this season. Compare that with Manhattan. The Jaspers have played the third hardest conference schedule thus far. That’s by far the hardest schedule of any contender thus far. It also makes me think that the Jaspers, and their impressive defense, are for real.
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Tempo-free MAAC: Does anyone want to challenge Iona?
There’s a very clear cut No. 1 team in the MAAC this season. Iona has taken all comers and delivered convincing win after convincing win. It’s good enough that the Gaels are currently projected as a 12 seed in ESPN’s latest bracketology (playing Vanderbilt!). The big question now is if any team is going to challenge the Gaels. We’ll find out this week as more of the top teams have games against each other starting on Thursday with Iona vs. Manhattan and Fairfield vs. Loyola (Md.). Let’s look at what the per possessions stats tell us about those four teams.
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Both sides of the luck coin
There were seven games played by New York City area teams on Thursday night. St. Francis (NY) beat Quinnipiac 73-72 as Stefan Perunicic hit the game-tying layup, and game-winning free throw. Perunicic also scored his 1,000th point in the victory. Manhattan lost a real tough one to swallow as Dylon Cormier hit a three in the left corner on Loyola’s final possession in the Greyhounds’ 61-60 victory.
New York Mid-Major Non-Conference Teams
Nobody is in action today as we get ready for conference play, so it’s time to look back once more and name the All-New York Mid-Major Non-Conference teams. There are a lot of talented players to pick from in the New York City area. If I left your favorite player off one of the teams below let me know in the comments. I don’t like expanding beyond two teams, even though it’s possible, because at some point you just start including everyone and I wanted to avoid that situation.
MAAC Projection: Iona hasn’t won yet
Much like I did for the Big East, I ran 10,000 simulations for the MAAC (and a bunch of other conferences coming up in this series this week). The MAAC is a slightly different animal because it played conference games already this season. Four teams: Iona, Fairfield, Loyola (Md.) and Manhattan are ahead of schedule at 2-0. Four teams: Siena, Rider, Niagara and Canisius are behind at 0-2. (Marist and St. Peter’s are stuck in the middle, we’ll see why that’s important in a second.) All of this means that the simulations have to take this into account. It’d be really tough for one of those four bottom teams to take the league title away from one of the top four teams, but as you’ll see, it happened twice.
Early season grades for area teams
Since its exam break it seems like a good time to hand out some grades for each of the area teams. These grades are based on preseason expectations and there is absolutely no grade inflation here. Most teams are going to be in the C range and you’ll notice that I’ve liberally handed out a bunch of D’s as well. If you think your school deserved a better one feel free to argue in the comments. They’re listed from best to worst and I’ve also included a special one grade at the end.
Saturday Round Up: Manhattan streaking
You can see my recap of Columbia’s win over Long Island below, but there were six other games of note played last night as well. Some of them came right down to the wire and a few continued some interesting trends that we’ve witnessed during non-conference play.
NYC Buckets Archive 