Here We Go
Season eleven for the Model. Eleven!
It seemed clever, back in the spring or whenever, to start the season early for the new under-1oo student S Class. Their season ends a week early, after all, and they might need the extra time. But no one wants to start the regular season on the day after the Thanksgiving, apparently. And when Mother Nature dropped a blizzard on the state Tuesday, everything got pushed back to today, the start date for everyone else. So here we are with nearly everyone starting at the same time.
To quote the philosopher Rasheed Wallace, "Ball Don't Lie."
We do have 2 scores, though.
In one of the more compelling preseason matchups in years, the Valley girls (enrollment: 63) hosted the Bangor girls (enrollment: 1,069). People are always talking about how big schools should play small schools, but it so rarely happens for a bunch of reasons. But Valley and Bangor had a special connection that made it possible. Bangor won, but not by as much as the enrollment would indicate.
Mike Mandell was there.
Make no mistake: These two teams belonged on the same floor. Fueled by 3-pointers from Liana Hartwell and Delia Hill, Valley led Bangor early in the game. Although the Rams ultimately took the lead and kept it throughout the second half, the Cavaliers didn’t go away, pushing a school 17 times their size to the limit.
Mike MandellStaff Writer
It might be the last game Valley loses this year.
There's a reason they were the first team taken in the Wins Draft.
New Here?
There's a number of new people getting this newsletter, so if this is your first basketball season with the spreadsheet that hates your team, here's how this all works.
This is a free newsletter that publishes basically every day there's a countable game (sometimes I'll skip an obvious snow day or a day with 1 game), so essentially 6 days a week. The newsletter will give you a summary of what happened the night before, including some key performances from around the state. I'll try to highlight some cool stuff that happened, show you buzzer-beaters and cool dunks, opine on whatever controversy pops up, and generally talk about what you might have otherwise missed. Then there's a Game of the Day and, for paid subscribers, the Model's predictions and point spreads for all the day's games (today the Brunswick boys are a 1.6 point favorite over Greely). Plus you get a bunch of other stuff like better Heal Points and a thing that tells you what seed you can still get in the tourney WAY faster and more accurate than anyone else.
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If you've got a performance worth noting (double-doubles are nice), you can put it on the Scoreboard
You can put scores in (desktop only) and put anything notable in the notable column. If the game gets snowed out, you'll be able to see or enter that. It's also a pretty good guess as to where the game might be streaming. It's become an incredibly helpful page for scoreboard watching.
And if you've got video of a buzzer-beater, cool dunk, or a parent getting ejected, send it to me (email: mainebasketballrankings [at] gmail)
Cooper is figuring it out and he grabbed his first Rookie of the Month award.
Grant Afseth
Numbers
As an explanation for why everything isn't up and running yet, let's do a little bit of a look at how the Model, etc. works behind the scenes. I can't really start building out the Model, Scoreboard, Heal Points, etc, until I have the schedules uploaded. Makes sense. I've gotten the system of converting the schedules from the MPA site down pretty well, but when I pulled the boys schedules last night around 6pm (because I waited as long as I possibly could), only something like 56% of schools had an 18 game schedule loaded. After some searching on social media (you'd be amazed how many active school social media accounts don't have schedules on them. I'm not sure how some of these schools get anyone to go to their games), I got that number up to around 84%. I know what you're thinking: the North Haven cancellation is creating chaos, but North Haven wasn't playing that many Class B teams, you know?
All that to say I got the boys Model more or less under control and should have everything up and running in the next couple of days.
Upload your schedules!
Here's also the reminder that the Model has zero opinion built into it. It's 100% math, despite what people think. The number one rule for it is that I can't incorporate anything that I can't do for everyone in the state. So, I know that Jamier Rose is no longer at Noble, but I can't just dock Noble because there's no way to know what everyone else lost (or how much value they lost), so the Model makes zero adjustments from last season. It starts with last season and takes a couple of games to figure out the new normal.
Why not just start everyone at zero? Well, the good teams tend to stay good and bad teams tend to stay bad, so you need to have a baseline. Anyway, it's going to get some games very wrong in the first week. It'll dial itself in before you know it.
The Model's picks for today's (boys) games are after the jump.