Even though last season was the first in which New Mexico State won the regular season title in this stretch, the Aggies have claimed the last four automatic bids into the NCAA tournament.
After losing four seniors off last year’s team that went 13-1 in WAC play, however, the time might be ripe for someone else to take over atop the heap next season. The bad news there is that New Mexico State won the league by 5 games and Seattle, the only WAC team to beat the Aggies last season, lost its best two players to graduation.
Missouri-Kansas City looks like the best shot to knock off the Aggies. UMKC returns its best player, point guard Martez Harrison, and loses just two players from its rotation. The Kangaroos also will get senior Shayok Shayok, who played in just seven games last season due to a shoulder injury, back. UMKC loses four players, Deshon Taylor, Isaac Kreuer, Kevin Franceschi, and Collin Jennings to transfer, but none of those players were significant contributors, and only Taylor had an offensive rating over 100 last season.
The WAC was the 31st ranked KenPom conference for a reason. The average team had a KenPom rating of just .2457, which drops precipitously if you take out New Mexico State’s .6509. The league, as one might imagine, struggles to attract good recruits, so teams need to develop talent over a number of years. If that plan goes even a bit awry, such as if four UMKC players transfer, it can set teams back much more than in a power conference. It’s worth noting, however, that last year’s KenPom conference player of the year was New Mexico State freshman Pascal Siakam.
That said, when trying to find a team to knock off the Aggies, it makes the most sense to find the team with the best combination of good KenPom rating and percentage of minutes returning. To do this visually, we plot a graph with a team’s 2014-15 KenPom rank on one axis, and percentage of minutes returning on the other.
(In case the table is not embedding, you can click here)
As seems to happen a lot in the low major leagues, the worst teams in the conference are the ones returning the most minutes, while league champ New Mexico State returns among the fewest. The table doesn’t reveal a favorite, and I think the standings will be a bit more bunched up than last season. New Mexico State looks good and has winning experience, Seattle returns a lot of talent from the team that went to the title game, Cal State Bakersfield should be making a bit of a jump, and UMKC probably has the best player in the conference.
Projected Standings:
1. Seattle
2. New Mexico State
3. Cal State Bakersfield
4. Grand Canyon
5. UMKC
6. Utah Valley
7. Texas Pan American
8. Chicago State
