I’m using my ratings and Bill James’ log5 formula to estimate the chances of each participating team advancing to a particular round of its conference tournament.

America East
Location: Quarters and semis at Albany, final at higher seed
Dates: March 8, 9, 15
Chance of bid thief: zero
Current kPOY: Clancy Rugg, Vermont

Projections:

               Semis  Final  Champ
1 Vermont       95.6   72.3   64.0
2 Stony Brook   89.2   63.4   19.9
4 Albany        87.1   26.1    8.7
3 Hartford      77.6   30.0    6.8
6 Binghamton    22.4    3.9    0.2
5 UMBC          12.9    1.0    0.1
7 Maine         10.8    2.7    0.1
8 New Hampshire  4.4    0.7    0.07

Vermont took Duke to the limit in Cameron early in the season, shredding the Duke defense for 1.39 points per possession, the most the Blue Devils have allowed since I’ve been tracking this stuff. That was the warmup act for their romp through America East. They did lose a game, on the road to Stony Brook, when the Seawolves built a 17-point lead and then held on for dear life to win by three. The Catamounts dominated their other 15 conference games, though, and finished with an average scoring margin of +20.88 in America East games.

The gold standard for conference domination over the past decade is held by the 2011 Belmont team which outscored its Atlantic Sun opponents by an average of 20.90 points. The Bruins’ conference season was four games longer than Vermont’s, so they deserve a little more credit for their work, but UVM has been killing it. In fact, on a per-possession basis, Vermont’s work was more dominant than Belmont’s. The average trip down the court netted the Catamounts 0.331 points per possession compared to 0.308 for ‘11 Belmont.

Vermont is not a prohibitive favorite in the AE tourney, though. They drew the short straw with a potential road game against Albany in the semis. This was the undoing of top-seeded Stony Brook in last season’s event. And a potential title matchup with the Seawolves should be more competitive than the typical Vermont game this season.