MBB: NESCAC

[SpringSt7]

I think Johnson very clearly over Maccoux. Even if you think Johnson's assists are inflated, they would have to be absurdly inflated to move below second in the league in assists and he barely turns the ball over -- very impressive given his usage. In conference play Johnson is shooting an identical percentage to Maccoux, averages more rebounds, far more assists and they basically have the same number of turnovers. Johnson is also top 5 in the league in steals.

I get that tracking assists can be inconsistent, but I think there's generally not enough credit to the elite passers. Averaging 5.5+ assists in the Nescac happens about as often as averaging 19+ points -- and almost anyone who averages that many points makes all-league.

I don't really have strong opinions on all-league overall -- I think there's a lot of somewhat similar players after the top 2-3. I will say that I think there's too much focus on team success compared with individual success. Don't really think the whole "this team doesn't deserve two slots" holds a lot of merit -- it's basically just crediting players for having better or worse supporting casts.

On the coaching side that argument works, because these coaches are also the ones recruiting their team as well.

Fair points on all. I guess where I am coming from on the assists is that there is a big difference between 5 a game and 7-8 a game. 7-8 a game is AA type stuff for the most part.

I'm not quite with my Williams brethren nescac1 re: Maccoux. If you wanted to flip him and Johnson I'd be fine with that. He is the engine that makes them go and has done more than enough to show that in league play. With that being said I am not quite ready to give Johnson so much praise. On the whole he is averaging 13 a game on 40-29-71 splits and if he started the season shooting better they would probably be in Pool C contention right now. But I also did just watch Williams end their Pool C hopes for good in a game where he shot 5-14 from the field and their 4 guards scored 17, 16, 11, and 11 points.

I think we all watched him in the NESCAC tournament last year and down the stretch of the championship game in particular and said "wow this kid is a winner". Which he is! But I don't know that he needs to be anointed to the unassailable level of "beyond the box score" impact like he is a 5th year senior who has made 90 starts. I think he can just be evaluated like everybody else, which Colby Hoops did a great job of and of illustrating his impact in a statistical manner.   

[names jaismith]

Well this one is not on the dance card to boost the SOS.  I predict Amherst will win by 50.  And play 15 guys in the first six minutes.

[toad22]

One of the worst parts about having a really bad season is that it is over very early and, for most teams anyway, practices stop. Teams stop getting better. If a team can consistently get into the second round of NCAA play, they get one month more of practices and games than those who don't make the NESCAC tournament. That is a massive difference. That is part of the reason good programs stay good and bad programs have a hard time rising.

[jumpshot]

amHerst edges Pratt by 43, 87-44 in LeFrak. Embarrassing and silly, particularly since the Pratt Family with at least six jeff graduates contributed entire buildings, dorms, and fields over the generations to amHerst. Why have this scrimmage? As a player, my preference would have been to go to the library or Northhampton in advance of the long upcoming weekend trip to Maine .... oh well ... names jaismith you failed to cover the spread by 7 points!

[names jaismith]

So many things could happen this weekend.  Just about every team has a lot to play for.  Most interesting games for me will be Colby v Amherst and Hamilton.  Colby needs at least one win, maybe two. Amherst needs to beat Colby or it's over as far as playoffs.  Hamilton will want top seed in the tournament so they can play at home, where they have been so tough.  Colby runs the league's best man offense, but if they are not shooting well from deep they might be in big trouble.

[middhoops]

First round of regional rankings are out.  These are alphabetically listed.

https://d3hoops.com/playoffs/men/2023/men-regional-rankings-alpha

[mathteacherjedi]

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but can someone explain the delineation between region 1 and region 2? It doesn't, well, seem particularly regional. There's not a clear southern / northern or western / eastern split. Or is it done by leagues? And if that's the case, what happens if an MIT or Brandeis were to be ranked?

[SpringSt7]

Ephs complete an undefeated nonconference season with a 63-57 win over SUNY New Paltz. They missed a million layups but also looked incredibly slow footed defensively for about the first 30 minutes before really clamping down.

Always good to have more reps in a close game, as this was a 1 point game with 25 seconds left before a huge Declan Porter three, but definitely a bit of a momentum halter. Regardless, good to learn these lessons in a win instead of a loss.

The story was Alex Lee who scored 25 points on 9-12 shooting and 5-6 threes off the bench, every single basket huge and a time they desperately needed them, including 2 back to back when they were trailing I believe in the 6-8 point range. He is going to be a special player, a true 3 level scorer who can do so much off the dribble. It feels crazy to say this but he reminds me of Bobby Casey. He is getting better and better every day and will be a huge piece in March.

Probably best to forget this game ever happened for everyone not named Alex Lee but no such thing as a bad win! And congrats to Coach App, his first 20 win regular season as head coach. Hard to believe.

[nescac1]

Well, it's fair to say that Alex Lee saved the Ephs' butts vs. New Paltz tonight - 25 points, 9-12 from the field, 5-6 from 3, absolutely clutch down the stretch, what a game.  Frankly, it just wasn't Williams' night but fortunately they hung on to win.  They missed about 6-7 point blank layups, several of them totally uncontested.  Declan Porter had two threes that looked pure somehow rim out.  It just seemed like it was not his night but fortunately he stayed ready, hitting the game clincher, a tough contested 3 from the corner as the shot clock expired.  Even when he seems way off, he's always on. 

For Williams, they won't beat many teams when Nate, Spivy and Porter all have very rough offensive games at the same time.  All three (and really the entire team other than Alex Lee) seemed out of synch.  Hopefully that won't happen again this year!

Alex Lee has gotten better and better as the year has gone along.  He's been great the last two games and has continued to earn more and more PT.

Ryan Blondo is an excellent player for New Paltz and played great.  But the overall talent is not in the Ephs' league and Williams will happily take the win, put this one behind them, and hope to get back to the level of play they had over the past weekend in time for the regular season finale!   

Edit: just read SpringSt7's - unsurprisingly - consistent take on the game.  And agree with the Bobby Casey comparison!  He's smaller and doesn't have the same ability to bump guys off around the rim, but Lee is definitely quicker off the bounce to compensate.  A true three-level scorer who plays with a ton of passion and is now starting to add poise to that package. 

[Hamilton4]

If Tufts gets swept this weekend they'll drop all the way down to the 6 seed behind Wesleyan and Trinity. It's great to see all these scenarios play out in the final weekend!

[jumpshot]

Agree with SpringSt7 and nescac1, only Alex Lee came ready to play tonight, the rest of the Ephs not into it for some reason. New Paltz simply appeared to want the game more, until the final 5 minutes when Alex had a one-person coming out party. Will need much more attention to detail, concentration, and energy from evert player Sunday afternoon at ConnCollege

[deiscanton]

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but can someone explain the delineation between region 1 and region 2? It doesn't, well, seem particularly regional. There's not a clear southern / northern or western / eastern split. Or is it done by leagues? And if that's the case, what happens if an MIT or Brandeis were to be ranked?

The numbered regions are more like evaluation groups than actual geographic regions for its RACs to work on. Region 1 and Region 2 used to be the old Northeast Region, which had 8 conferences plus Brandeis of the UAA for its regional advisory committee to work on how to advise the DIII national committees in many sports to rank teams for Pool C selection purposes.  The Northeast Region was the largest region by number of teams of the old 8 regions of DIII for many of the sport-related RACs to rank teams. 

To make the job of ranking teams easier, it was decided a few years ago to split up the old 8 regions into 10 numbered evaluation groups and get rid of the nomenclature of Northeast, East, Atlantic, Mid-Atlantic, South, Great Lakes, Central, and West evaluation regions and instead assign each new region a Roman numeral.

For basketball-- Region I consists of the NESCAC, the GNAC, the North Atlantic, and the MASCAC.  Representatives of these 4 conferences consist of the RAC for Region I, and there will be a chair of the region who will represent these 4 conferences on the national committee.   Region II consists of the NEWMAC, the Little East, the Commonwealth Coast Conference, the NECC, and Brandeis of the UAA.  By number of teams, Region II is the smallest of the 10 evaluation regions, so with fewer than 35 DIII men's basketball teams in Region II, only 6 teams will be regionally ranked in Region II since that is the top 20% of the region.

At the end of this academic year, the NECC will ceast to exist as a DIII conference-- it will continue as an esports league.  The remaining 4 NECC teams have found new homes.  All of these 4 teams will move from Region II to Region I with 2 teams (Mitchell and New England College) joining the GNAC, and the other 2 teams (Lesley and Eastern Nazarene) joining the North Atlantic.  This takes effect on July 1, 2023.

Last year, the RACs were charged with having to rank the top 20% of each evaluation region, but since most of the 10 evaluation regions have more than 35 teams per region, the RACs were stuck having to advise the national committees on how to rank the #8, #9, and in some cases the #10 team in each region.  This amounted to having too many teams whose resumes were not Pool C worthy getting regionally ranked.  To solve this, the new rule is that the top 20% of the evaluation region or the top 7 teams in the evaluation region will be ranked, whichever is the smaller number.

MIT (of NEWMAC) and Brandeis are both in Region II, so if those teams were to be regionally ranked, they would appear in the Region II list.  The UAA is the historic multi-region conference of DIII, and currently one of two multi-region conferences where each individual team is placed in its natural evaluation region for ranking purposes.  The Coast to Coast Conference is the other multi-region league.

if a team is regionally ranked by the DIII Men's Basketball national committee (for purposes of this discussion here) after the advice of its respective RACs, the placement of the team in the region determines the order in which the team will get to the national table for that region for Pool C selection considerations.  After that, the Pool C and bracketing considerations are done on a national basis, with the bracketing done to minimize flights if at all possible so that as many teams in a first or second weekend pod as possible are within 500 miles of each other.  500 miles was deemed by NCAA DIII as the longest distance you can bus a team to a site before you have to arrange a flight.

Originally back when there were much smaller fields (the NCAA DIII tournament had a field of 48 on the men's side until 2005), the bracketing was geographically very regional, with only Northeast teams playing each other in the first weekend, for example, and the surviving 2 teams from the Northeast Region getting paired up with the surviving 2 teams from either the East, Atlantic, or Mid-Atlantic for second weekend sectionals.  Back then, it was rare for a team in one region to get shipped out to another region for first weekend play, and that was only done to numerically balance out the regions.  DIII fans around the 2000s did not feel that this represented a true national tournament.  DII still has this feature of not being a true national tournament until the 8 regional champions meet in the Elite Eight for the national quarterfinal round.  In DII's East Region, the 3 AQs from the NE10, the ECC, and the CACC meet with 5 at-large teams from those 3 conferences for a regional title and a spot in the "Elite Eight".

[nescac1]

I know the old system wasn't perfect either but I preferred having eight regions rather than ten when four of them will in a good number of years be dominated by one league (NESCAC, WIAC, ODAC and CCIW) and some have to really stretch at the back end for teams. 

Under the old region 1, I assume the top ten right now would be something like St. Joe's, Midd, Williams, Keene, Tufts, WPI, Hamilton, Wesleyan, Western Conn, Western New England.  That is loaded but also drops off appropriately at the back end.   Instead we have a region 1 where if St. Joe's has a drop off as a program at any point we could eventually have an all-Nescac top seven and a region two that also really has to stretch to find teams in some years (although to be fair NEWMAC is having an uncharacteristically down year, usually it has 2-3 no-brainers). And that's not generally the worst region.

[toad22]

The squeaker of a game last night at Chandler gym reminded me of the game Williams played against New Paltz in January 2010, right in the middle of our league play. Williams had a great team that year, going 30-2 and losing in the last minute of the national championship game. Williams just got by the Hawks that night 70-68. In the vernacular of sports fans everywhere, this was a "trap game" for Williams. The 2010 game was played at New Paltz, and it remains so strongly in my memory for several reasons, including, it was the one and only time I was the only Eph fan at a game. Usually there are local alumni attending, parents, etc. there was nobody at this game but me. Second, there were only a smattering of Hawk fans in attendance as the game began. This was a non-league, Tuesday night game, and New Paltz had a mediocre record, so light attendance was what I expected. Williams came out lethargic and disjointed. The Hawks were playing great. They took the lead and held the lead for much of the game. As the game went on, the crowd began to build, and build. By the last two minutes of H2, the place was jammed! Williams escaped with a win when a New Paltz guard missed a three pointer at the buzzer. Williams' second year coach, the great Mike Maker, was beside himself trying to get the team play better, but there are some games when nothing works and even great team don't have much to give.

[names jaismith]

For me the most interesting part of the last weekend will be who rises up to snatch the top seed and who rises up to snatch the eighth seed.  Hamilton has a great chance to play at home.  All they have to do is go on the road and beat Bowdoin (highly likely) and Colby (dicey).  Given how well the Continentals have played in Clinton, no one should want to play there.  In any event, the best three teams are clearly Hamilton, Midd, and Williams.  Williams looked in full revival mode until last night, when they were lucky to escape a middling New Paltz squad.  Williams and Midd have the biggest advantage in that they each have just one game this weekend with Conn.  Conn has been the epitome of pesky - just ask Tufts or Trinity.  They're 8-2 at home but their starting point guard, who usually logs over 35 minutes a game, is out with an injury.  Hard to see how Conn, even with a valiant effort, can win either game.  That would leave them at 4-6, vulnerable to being edged out on the last day.  In this case, they will rue that horrid offensive effort against Bowdoin when they held Bowdoin to 54 but somehow held themselves to 42.  The NESCAC is so strong that even teams who made the NCAA alphabetical "ranking" have fallen to those who might not even make the league tournament.