{"id":1584,"date":"2017-03-02T12:11:39","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T18:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/?p=1584"},"modified":"2017-03-02T12:11:55","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T18:11:55","slug":"2017-wcc-tournament-forecast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/2017-wcc-tournament-forecast\/","title":{"rendered":"2017 WCC tournament forecast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>West Coast\u00a0Conference<\/strong>\u00a0(conference rank: 11th)<br \/>\nMarch 3-7<br \/>\nAll games at Las Vegas.<br \/>\n<strong>kPOY:<\/strong>\u00a0Jock Landale, Saint Mary&#8217;s<br \/>\n<strong>Regular season champ:<\/strong>\u00a0Gonzaga (preseason #22 \/ 2nd\u00a0WCC, current #1)<br \/>\n<strong>Overachiever:<\/strong>\u00a0Gonzaga<br \/>\n<strong>Underachiever:<\/strong>\u00a0Pepperdine (preseason #139, current #295)<\/p>\n<p>Pacism is alive and well in college basketball and one need look no further than the WCC, where Jock Landale\u00a0was as productive as any human in the nation this season. But because his team, Saint Mary&#8217;s, plays at the nation&#8217;s second-slowest pace, he will not make any all-American teams nor was he selected as the WCC&#8217;s player of the year by the league&#8217;s coaches. Let&#8217;s compare how he stacks up to the winner:<!--more--><\/p>\n<pre>               ORtg  %Poss   TS%\r\nWilliams-Goss 122.7   24.4  62.0\r\nLandale       122.0   31.0  63.8<\/pre>\n<p>These numbers aren&#8217;t the end of the discussion, but Landale has been nearly as efficient as Nigel Willams-Goss while using a much larger share of his team&#8217;s offense. Throw in the fact that Landale is one of two players nationally to rank in the top 20 of both offensive and defensive rebounding percentage and the case for him\u00a0becomes even stronger.<\/p>\n<p>True, Williams-Goss played slightly more and I&#8217;m guessing there&#8217;s a bonus that a point guard gets in consideration for such awards. There&#8217;s also the issue that Williams-Goss played for the league champs. But if the possession counts\u00a0of the respective teams were reversed &#8211; Gonzaga played over 10 possessions per game faster than Saint Mary&#8217;s &#8211; I&#8217;d image Landale would have won the WCC&#8217;s player of the year and Williams-Goss would be the one criminally underrated.<\/p>\n<p>No matter, chances are that the two will\u00a0match up in the title game of the tournament. Saint Mary&#8217;s and Gonzaga\u00a0cover approximately 97% of the champion&#8217;s probability, a dominance among the top two that\u00a0even the MVC can&#8217;t match.<\/p>\n<pre><b>                     Qtrs Semis Final Champ<\/b>\r\n 1 Gonzaga            100  99.5  95.4  70.4\r\n 2 Saint Mary's       100  95.4  78.3  27.0\r\n 3 BYU                100  76.3  18.1   1.6\r\n 5 San Francisco      100  58.5   2.7   0.6\r\n 4 Santa Clara        100  41.5   1.7   0.3\r\n 6 Loyola Marymount   100  23.7   2.9   0.1\r\n 9 Pacific           62.4   0.5   0.1   0.009\r\n 7 San Diego         55.1   2.9   0.5   0.006\r\n10 Portland          44.9   1.6   0.2   0.003\r\n 8 Pepperdine        37.6   0.08  0.02  0.002<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>West Coast\u00a0Conference\u00a0(conference rank: 11th) March 3-7 All games at Las Vegas. kPOY:\u00a0Jock Landale, Saint Mary&#8217;s Regular season champ:\u00a0Gonzaga (preseason #22 \/ 2nd\u00a0WCC, current #1) Overachiever:\u00a0Gonzaga Underachiever:\u00a0Pepperdine (preseason #139, current #295) Pacism is alive and well in college basketball and one need look no further than the WCC, where Jock Landale\u00a0was as productive as any human [&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\/1584"}],"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=1584"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1600,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584\/revisions\/1600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}