Welcome to The Holy Land of Hoops

1:30pm - 3 Villanova vs. Wake Forest, ESPN2 - Roy Philpott, Mark Plansky
Charleston Classic semifinal
Line:

1:30pm - Clemson vs. 11 Xavier, ESPNU - Álvaro Martín, Cory Alexander
Tire Pros Invitational semifinal
Line:

4:30pm - Pitt vs. Marquette ESPN2 - Karl Ravech, Fran Fraschilla
2K Classic 3rd place
Line:

8:30pm - Washington State vs 23 Creighton- no tv
Paradise Jam- 1st round
Line: Creighton -15 156

9:00pm - St. John's @ Minnesota, BTN- Jeff Levering, Stephen Bardo
Gavitt Tip-Off Games
Line: Minnesota -7 150

Wash St/Creighton is on CBSSN.

huge day. Nova should beat Wake- but Manning has Wake playing well.... Clemson/Xavier is a huge one. Xavier plays badly they're going to get killed. Pitt/Marquette is a big one. Right now- Ken Pom has Marquette projected as 9-9 in conference and 19-11 overall. With win today. If accurate, that would get in. BUT a loss today and that puts them on the wrong side of the ledger.

Important game for my Johnnies. First chance to make a real statement. I expect MSU to blow us out, so a win here would be really nice. The Ponds/LoVett duo handled Bethune-Cookman and crushed Binghamton (score was not an indication, we took LoVett out early and let them get garbage points). Now we will see what we look like against a not great but rock solid Minnesota team the first test of a major conference opponent. Thanks a lot to G'Town...we could have gone into tonight knowing we won the Gavitt games already but now it's on a bunch of freshmen on St. John's away from home. If we can handle business tonight I think you will start to see some real attention and credit given to this Johnnies squad. We always hear how much experience matters and it does, but Ponds and LoVett have not played like freshmen so far, especially LoVett. If LoVett wasn't taken out early in every game so far he could have been averaging 30 pts going into Minnesota. I hope LoVett doesn't stay with his jumper if it's not falling and drives into the paint to mix it up. So far it has been, but if it's not falling and he isn't driving to the hoop it will be a big problem. I noticed that when we go on big scoring runs, it's usually led directly by Ponds or LoVett. When they try to get the bigs involved offensively, the opponents go on runs. If we lose to Minnesota, I expect it to be due to our bigs getting pushed around and fumbling the passes that come their way.

Looks like the X line is X-3 in Vegas.

KenPom:

Big East Favored:
83-70 Villanova (88.0%)
84-72 Creighton (86.0%)

Toss-Ups:
79-77 Marquette (57.0%)
75-74 Xavier (52.0%)

Big East Not Favored:
79-71 Minnesota (26.0%)

Current lines per @rtcbigeast:

Nova -12 vs Wake
Xavier -1.5 vs Clemson
Marquette -1 vs Pitt
Creighton -14.5 vs Wash St
St. John's +6.5 at Minny

Love these afternoon weekday games. Gives me an excuse to be unproductive at work.

so looking at Ken Pom ratings- start of season to now....
Nova started 2/current 2- even
Xavier 11/17 6 spots worse
Butler 22/28 6 spots worse
Creighton 32/33 1 spot worse
Marquette 47/41 6 spots better
Georgetown 30/48 18 spots worse
Providence 63/56 7 spots better
St John's 108/92 16 spots better
DePaul 171/201 30 spots worse

net 32 spots worse, with 30 of those being DePaul.

stever20 wrote:Wash St/Creighton is on CBSSN.

Negative - this game is streaming only by joining flohoops for $20 - stever strikes again.

TrueBlueJay wrote:

stever20 wrote:Wash St/Creighton is on CBSSN.

Negative - this game is streaming only by joining flohoops for $20 - stever strikes again.

I see what happened- where I was looking had 2 games on the same network... weird..
http://www.cbssports.com/tvlistings

not a good look for Xavier. Davidson killing Missouri 26-13 early today.