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Three picks for the evening.
As always:
- Lines come from the Vegas Consensus at the time this is written, or the best approximation I can find of it online.
- Data and predictions from KenPom, FanGraphs, Baseball Savant, and ESPN is/are often used and/or cited.
- The blurbs often aren’t justifications of the picks. Often, they’re instead just notes about something or someone related to the pick. Something that interests me. I don’t explain the picks because in general, the rationale behind each pick is the same, so it would be boring to say over and over again that the numbers I use project a good return on investment and I see no red flags significant enough to make me hold off.
Akron @ Kent State
It’s a big night in the MAC between this one and Bowling Green’s visit to Buffalo. There’s roughly a 70% chance one of these four teams gets the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, and if an NIT automatic bid comes from the league, it’s about 85% likely to be one of the four.
Akron’s been fine on the road in conference play, with both their losses coming at home. Too much shouldn’t be made of this—the losses came to Toledo and Buffalo, both in the MAC’s better half—but the Zips are the visiting team tonight, and they’ve scored at least one point per possession in each of their road games this year, including trips to Morgantown and Louisville. After a rough shooting night Tuesday from everyone not named Loren Cristian Jackson, look for Channel Banks to bounce back, and keep an eye on Tyler Cheese and Xeyrius Williams. Kent State’s perimeter defense has been mediocre to date, and Akron has a variety of options.
On the other end of the floor, the Golden Flashes are likely missing freshman point guard Giovanni Santiago, who was in concussion protocol as of yesterday. Santiago’s had some flashes of brilliance—his assist rate’s impressive—but he was averaging only six and a half minutes per conference game before missing the last two. He shouldn’t be hard to replace, and Kent State, like Akron, has an experienced core that can score in a variety of ways.
The biggest risks to this pick are a lower tempo than expected and a bad night from deep for one or both of the teams. Neither plays a particularly fast or slow pace, so something like the Division I average of 68 possessions is a reasonable expectation, requiring each to land at or above 1.07 points per possession to hit the over. That’s a high number, but it’s below what you’d expect from each offense against an average defense, and neither defense is much better than average.
Pick: Over 145.5 (-115). Low confidence.
Dartmouth @ Princeton
Dartmouth couldn’t get a win in either end of their Ivy League-opening series with Harvard, dropping the pair by just four and five points. Now, they’re staring down four straight road games—the Princeton/Penn trip tonight and tomorrow followed by Brown and Yale next weekend. While Dartmouth’s odds of winning the Ivy League’s regular season title are already nearly nonexistent, they do have a shot at qualifying for the Ivy League tournament. Harvard and Yale are shoe-ins, but Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, and Brown each have a chance at one of the final two. With Princeton having already swept Penn, at least one win this weekend seems imperative for the Big Green.
Their chances of making it happen tonight aren’t great. Princeton’s an efficient scoring team by low-major standards, with Richmond Aririguzoh effective inside, Drew Friberg effective outside, and Ryan Schwieger effective both inside and out. The Tigers might be without Ryan Langborg tonight—the freshman guard has missed the last three and only played three minutes in the game before that. Langborg isn’t a huge contributor, but he was a starter before he went down, so Dartmouth could have that going for them, though they themselves might be missing Trevon Ary-Turner, who fills a similar role to Langborg in the Big Green’s rotation.
The path to a Dartmouth victory may be dependent on a noteworthy performance from Chris Knight. The big man isn’t a particularly efficient scorer, but he does get to the free throw line, and if he does that at the expense of Aririguzoh, Princeton should become one-dimensional, forced to score almost exclusively outside. Beyond Knight, or perhaps because of him, Dartmouth has one of the most three point-heavy splits in the country defensively, so even if Aririguzoh does stay on the floor, it’ll have to be a good night for the perimeter defense for the Big Green to have a shot. Friberg and Schwieger are the best shooters for Princeton, but that doesn’t stop the rest of the offense from trying. If Dartmouth can force lesser options to shoot, get a good performance out of Knight, and find James Foye open enough to make his own impact, they can grab a much-needed victory. It’s not probable, but it’s more probable than these odds would suggest.
Pick: Dartmouth to win (+215). Low confidence.
VCU @ Rhode Island
Neither VCU nor URI will likely find themselves an NCAA Tournament lock at any point over the rest of the season, barring a victory over Dayton and no bad losses, both of which are a lot to ask this year in the A-10. Both teams, though, are in a position in which doing what they should do should be enough to land them on the right side of the bubble. The pair clearly makes up the second tier in their conference, filling the void between Dayton and Richmond, and they’re better enough than Richmond and the rest that at this point, they’d both likely be favored over any conference opponent except for each other and the Flyers. Lose to Dayton, win the rest, and do whichever tonight, and each will have done their part in making the Atlantic-10 a three-bid league.
Of course, while each is in a good place, each would also benefit immensely from winning tonight, if for no other reason than to make the next seven weeks a little less white-knuckle. Of the two, Rhode Island has the better opportunity to do it. These Rams are strong defensively, and they make up for their inability to score efficiently by protecting the ball and grabbing offensive boards. Their defense is particularly effective outside the arc, which was the story when these two met in Richmond a few weeks back, a day on which VCU made just six of their 28 three-point attempts.
For their part, the other Rams—those of VCU—are also strong on the defensive end. They force turnovers at one of the highest rates in the nation, and they definitely frustrated Fatts Russell in the previous meeting, getting him to cough it up four times while holding him to 25% shooting from the field (though he did notch an eye-popping seven steals at the other end). They’ve only allowed more than a point per possession four times this year, and the opponents who’ve done it to them—Dayton, LSU, Tennessee, and the College of Charleston—are no easy foes to defend.
It should be gritty. It might be ugly. But in the end, URI’s home-court advantage makes them the better team in this, something the moneyline doesn’t reflect.
Pick: Rhode Island to win (-105). Low confidence.
