{"id":1550,"date":"2017-02-28T09:49:45","date_gmt":"2017-02-28T15:49:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/?p=1550"},"modified":"2017-02-28T09:49:59","modified_gmt":"2017-02-28T15:49:59","slug":"2017-nec-tournament-forecast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/2017-nec-tournament-forecast\/","title":{"rendered":"2017 NEC tournament forecast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Northeast Conference<\/strong>\u00a0(conference rank: 30th)<br \/>\nMarch 1, 4, 7<br \/>\nAll games at higher seed.<br \/>\n<strong>kPOY:<\/strong>\u00a0Elijah Long, Mount St. Mary&#8217;s<br \/>\n<strong>Regular season champ:<\/strong>\u00a0Mount St. Mary&#8217;s (preseason #290 \/ 3rd NEC, current #214)<br \/>\n<strong>Overachiever:<\/strong>\u00a0St. Francis PA (preseason #326, current #263)<br \/>\n<strong>Underachiever:<\/strong>\u00a0St. Francis NY (preseason #324, current #346)<\/p>\n<p>The ten-team NEC invites the top eight to its conference tournament, so it&#8217;s time to bid farewell to Central Connecticut and St. Francis Brooklyn. The other eight will battle it out on the NEC&#8217;s notoriously hospitable home floors for a likely trip to Dayton in the NCAA tournament.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Mount St. Mary&#8217;s won the regular season by two full games despite starting the season 1-11 while playing a SWAC-style\u00a0buy-game tour. The record didn&#8217;t tell the whole story as the Mountaineers rating actually rose over the first 12 games. But the reality is there&#8217;s not much separating the eight teams in this event and whoever emerges\u00a0is going to have to play better than usual to win.<\/p>\n<p>Preseason favorite Wagner is still lurking. The Seahawks were a mild disappointment after opening the season with a fairly easy victory at UConn. They finished in third with an 11-7 conference record, but four of those losses were by two points of less or in overtime. However, they suffered a blow to their chances when their outstanding center, Mike Aaman, tore an ACL in the second-to-last game of the season.<\/p>\n<p>That could open the door for LIU Brooklyn, who once again is led by 6-7 scorer Jerome Frink. The Professor has led the team to six wins in a row although who knows if that means anything. The Blackbirds also have Talib Zanna&#8217;s young brother, Nura, and let&#8217;s just say that offensive rebounding runs in the family. LIU has the 13th-best offensive rebounding percentage in the land and has two players in the nation&#8217;s top 20 in Zanna and Raiquan Clark.<\/p>\n<pre><b>                       Semis Final Champ<\/b>\r\n 1 Mount St. Mary's     81.0  59.9  42.1\r\n 2 LIU Brooklyn         67.7  44.5  20.2\r\n 3 Wagner               69.0  36.2  16.3\r\n 4 St. Francis PA       65.3  23.8   9.0\r\n 5 Bryant               34.7  12.0   4.4\r\n 6 Fairleigh Dickinson  31.0   9.9   3.7\r\n 7 Robert Morris        32.3   9.0   3.2\r\n 8 Sacred Heart         19.0   4.7   1.3\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Northeast Conference\u00a0(conference rank: 30th) March 1, 4, 7 All games at higher seed. kPOY:\u00a0Elijah Long, Mount St. Mary&#8217;s Regular season champ:\u00a0Mount St. Mary&#8217;s (preseason #290 \/ 3rd NEC, current #214) Overachiever:\u00a0St. Francis PA (preseason #326, current #263) Underachiever:\u00a0St. Francis NY (preseason #324, current #346) The ten-team NEC invites the top eight to its conference tournament, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1550"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1565,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550\/revisions\/1565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}