America East
March 2, 7, 12. All games at higher seed.
kPOY: Jameel Warney, Stony Brook.

America East action gets started Wednesday night at four different locations.

America East employs a twist which I think makes sense for all conferences using the pure home court format. It reseeds the semi-finals. If you’re going to give higher seeds the advantage, then you might as well make the bracket fair as well. However, in America East this season, reseeding has almost no impact on the top teams’ chances. The only way re-seeding matters is if the 6, 7, or, 8 seeds win a first round game and that’s highly unlikely. Collectively, the top four teams lost just one game to one of the bottom four teams. That was Albany’s two-point loss at Maine in January.

So it’s a battle between the usual three: Stony Brook, Albany, and Vermont. The Great Danes are riding a nine-game winning streak in tournament play, but the Seawolves are the odds-on favorite to make it to their first NCAA tournament. Stony Brook’s senior center Jameel Warney racked up more game MVP’s (19) than any player in the land this season.

However, the coolest story of all would be for New Hampshire to end its own tournament drought. The Wildcats have never been to a postseason event of any kind (except for the CIT last season). They haven’t even appeared in a conference tournament championship game and they’ve been trying since 1982.

                Semis Final Champ
 1 Stony Brook   97.1  89.2  65.9
 2 Albany        96.1  75.5  26.8
 3 Vermont       93.6  25.1   6.0
 4 New Hampshire 84.4   9.1   1.2
 5 Binghamton    15.6   0.7   0.03
 8 UMBC           2.9   0.1   0.01
 7 Hartford       3.9   0.1   0.01
 6 Maine          6.4   0.2   0.01

America East conference tourney records (since 1999)

Vermont      27-12
Albany       17- 9
Stony Brook  14-14
UMBC          9-11
Binghamton    7-10
Hartford     11-17
Maine         8-17
New Hampshire 5-17