This weekend is chalk full of rematches and we will kick things off late night this evening when St. Mary’s welcomes USD into the McKeon Pavilion in Moraga, CA. We were on the Toreros just a few weeks back when they completely manhandled the Gaels for a much needed conference win.
Since that time, the anemic offense of San Diego has sent them on a three game losing streak, good for 4-9 in the WCC. St. Mary’s suffered yet another loss their following game to BYU and then bounced back for two wins over Loyola Marymount and Pepperdine.
SMC is one of the more interesting teams in the nation. they are guard centric but have a plethora of ball handlers and work the ball on offense. They are very selective with shot selection and often go four out, one in with Brad Waldow commanding the paint area.
Waldow was problematic in the first half against USD, but after the Toreros built their lead, SMC began to settle for outside shots and the game more or less got away from them. Dennis Kramer had difficulty in dealing with Waldown, but the San Diego guards did an excellent job of containing and limiting their St. Mary’s counterparts.
USD is a strong defensive club whose guards have tremendous quickness and lateral agility. SMC’s lack of a true point man proved to be a major issue as easy buckets were hard to come by in that first go around. But the rematch should be quite entertaining.
The Gael’s are very good at home, where their crowd provides them a great supporting cast. They surprisingly dropped a game versus Santa Clara in their building earlier this year, but you can bet that they will be amped up for this game here tonight.
SMC opens as 11 point favorites for this game, with the number finally settling in at 11.5. Based on that first match-up, I expect the St. Mary’s guards to continue to struggle a bit. Stephen Holt has historically had poor outings against the Toreros and I do not see that changing much here.
To cover a figure like the one presented, SMC needs another scorer to match Waldow’s output. 6’7 senior Beau Levesque really struggled in the first game, He was matched up with USD’s Jito Kok and Kok proved to be one of the few guys in the conference to outmatch Levesque when it came to length, making it more difficult for him to get clean looks from deep as he is most commonly a stretch four.
St. Mary’s is a good ball club, but i am very much interested in seeing how they respond in this game to some recent struggles. As bad as USD has looked in their last few games, this is a favorable match-up for them and a great opportunity for them to get back to playing better ball.
My initial inkling is that Randy Bennett and Co. will come out fired up for this one, but I’m not sure it necessarily justified a spread as high as 11.5. Still, the Gael’s could roll here if they can contain San Diego and force them into a difficult offensive game as they have the defensive pieces to do it.
This total opened at 130 and has since settled at 130.5 or so. The first game played to 104 and, while that is not indicative of the style most WCC teams incorporate, it is pretty standard for these two clubs as they do not look to run a ton and are both selective when it comes to shot taking.
Wait to see where this one lands, but playing the under might not be a bad potentiality. The downside of it is that St. Mary’s could come out looking to run up the score a bit. Should they build a nice 1H lead, look to grab an adjusted full game under if the 2H total puts the game into the 134-136 region.
