Bracketology 101: Breaking Down the East Bracket, Part II

The Eastern Regional bracket’s top half–the slate of games that appear higher as you look at the seedings–matches up Virginia-Coastal Carolina, Michigan State-Delaware, Cincinnati-Harvard, and George Washington-Memphis. Unlike in the other portion of games in the East, prognosticators might be better off making the safe picks here.  

The most likely upset appears to be the Ivy League champions surprising Cincinnati. Twelfth-seeded Harvard has improved from 47 to 33 (www.kenpom.com) in the final month of the season while Cincinnati has stayed stagnant at 24. Harvard has been the better team by a slight edge, and they look good to surprise unless Sean Kilpatrick (5th best player in Value Add) can come come up huge.

Home Advantage: George Washington could have the edge in Raleigh to pull the upset in the opening round against Memphis in a battle of two cold teams.

The following are the Value Add Rankings for each player in the top half of the East Region, their team’s seed, height, year in school, and which players are NBA prospects (all caps). The teams are Cincinnati (5-seed), Coastal Carolina (16), Delaware (13), George Washington (9), Harvard (12), Memphis (8), Michigan St. (4) and Virginia (1). 

The items listed for the top few players on each team should be the biggest considerations along with injured players, the home advantage, and which team enters the tournament hot (which we define as improving the most at www.kenpom.com over the past month of the season). The system is a precise measurement of how many points a player adds to his team’s score per game over the player who takes his place. Every score (three-pointer, two-pointer or foul shot), assist, offensive rebound, foul drawn, etc. helps a team score while every turnover and missed shot costs the team points. On defense, every steal, blocked shot, defensive rebound, turnover forced, and opponent’s missed shot takes points off the board while every basket or offensive rebound allowed adds to the opponent’s score. The player’s offensive and defensive combination calculates together with the help of the stats at www.kenpom.com. How many points a player adds to his team’s score appears in the offensive category (shown as “off” in the table below), and his overall impact on points once defense is factored appears as “Total” in the table.

Top East Bracket Players (teams in order they appear on bracket: table.tableizer-table { border: 1px solid #CCC; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif font-size: 12px; } .tableizer-table td { padding: 4px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid #ccc; } .tableizer-table th { background-color: #104E8B; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold; }