Memorial Days
Can the weather hold up for a long weekend?
Fair warning: somehow this is pushing 1,800 words and I didn't even go to a game this week for multiple different work reasons.
Let's just get to it.
Elsewhere
Cheverus' Colton Jewett had 14 strikeouts in a 1-hitter against Massabesic...Medomak softball coach Richard Vannah won his 200th game, a 15-0 mercy rule win over Oceanside...Hermon's Mikelle Verrill struck out 16 Old Town batters en route to a 3-1 victory...Bapst's Meredith Walsh no-hit Foxcroft...Noble's Wesley Turnbull tossed an 11-strikeout 1-hitter against Westbrook...Westbrook softball put up 16 runs in the first inning and coasted to a win over Sanford...Reese Bryant drove in 5 runs and tossed a 2-hitter in Bonny Eagle's win over Sanford...Greely's Katie Wallace went yard twice against Cape...Harlee Gasser struck out 12 as Lewiston knocked Oxford Hills from the ranks of the unbeaten...Sarah Orso drove in 4 runs in York's win over Poland.
We're starting to come down the stretch of the spring sports season and with the usual washouts and muddy fields and whatnot, there's surely a missing game or two. If you can check your team's schedule and let me know if I'm missing something (or a score was reported incorrectly), it'd be a big help.
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One of the early trailblazers in this land of sports data nerds was Nate Silver. You probably know him as the guy behind FiveThirtyEight who hasn't done great on social media in his pundit era, but before that, he was the guy who built a model that nailed the Obama/Clinton primaries and continued a victory lap for the entirety of the 2008 and 2012 elections. But before that, he was the guy who made PECOTA for Baseball Prospectus. (Fun fact: I once pitched a series of web commercials for Baseball Prospectus that might have been a couple of years before their time.) And before that, he was a guy on a poker forum talking about movies and $10/$20 limit strategy.
Anyway, news came down today that the archives of FiveThirtyEight, which Silver sold to Disney, had been deleted by the Mouse. Hours and hours of work gone. No warning. Just gone. It's a terrifying idea. And maybe it's more terrifying if you're a movie junkie who used to play online poker for a living and then started an anonymous blog where you started using a complicated Excel spreadsheet to predict stuff in a niche and then ended up having to go public with your identity. That old cliche.
Silver wrote a kind of post-mortem about the ordeal, which is pretty long. PECOTA is still alive and kicking years after he sold it to BP, which is the ideal outcome when you sell your sweat equity and entrust its care to someone else. But sometimes you sell and the large corporation doesn't care so much.
Seller beware.
FiveThirtyEight was initially licensed to the New York Times before selling the brand to Disney (via ESPN in the Grantland era) and maybe he shouldn't have sold the brand outright, but that's easy to say as a Monday morning quarterback.
Nate Silver
Do you have a friend who would enjoy a subscription to Maine Basketball Rankings but they're just too damn cheap to buy one themselves? Or maybe they need to see it in action to be convinced? Or maybe their team isn't doing as well as yours and you'd like to rub it in? Well ghost now supports gift subscriptions!
Apparently it's a big week for independent sports journalism.
Craig Calcaterra, who writes the Cup of Coffee newsletter (imagine if this newsletter was even more liable to go off on non-sports tangents, was better written, and had the average length of a Michael Hoffer gamer), was on the podcast So Many Questions...
Calcaterra, who recently moved from SubStack to ghost, has always been one of the North Star examples of what's possible in this space, so it's fascinating to hear his thoughts.
Stephen A. Smith has decided to pick a fight with Jaylen Brown.
Smith has forgotten the lesson of Ben Fong-Torres and mistaken himself as part of the story. He's not. He's paid a lot of money to foment rage on television because I guess people like that sort of thing? But it has no actual value beyond what advertising ESPN can sell in the same way that political talking heads don't actually contribute anything of value to our political ecosystem. They're just noise.
Stephen A. Smith could go away tomorrow and the sports world would be a better place. Clay Travis could go away tomorrow and the sports world would be a better place. The same could be said of Ben Shapiro. And Kendrick Perkins. And Hasan Piker. And Tucker Carlson. They don't do reporting. They don't do analysis. They don't create anything. They just piss people off.
You want me to be quiet and stop streaming. Well, I want you to be quiet and get off these networks because you’re not using your platform to do real journalism. You’re using your platform to use clickbait.
Put me down as Team Jaylen.
Gio Rivera
Longtime Maine Basketball Commissioner Peter Webb passed away on Thursday. Webb was in charge of officiating in Maine for 27 years and there's a long list of accolades in his obituary.
I didn't agree with Webb on...nearly anything...but it's impossible to discount his impact on basketball in the state of Maine.
RIP.
Steve CraigStaff Writer
Mackenzie Holmes had a big WNBA offseason abroad (or maybe she was inspired by her trip to the Expo for Tourney Week) and has turned that into production in the early days of the WNBA season.
A career-high at the half? That's tuff 😤
— WNBA (@WNBA) May 21, 2026
Mackenzie Holmes logged 14 PTS (career-high), 4 REB & 2 BLK in the 1H! Tune into League Pass to watch her work!
CON-SEA | League Pass
Tap to watch: https://t.co/YSArzWv71g pic.twitter.com/5qAIL3I3db
Holmes finished with 18 points and 6 boards.
Mike Schur, creator of The Good Place, was on Pablo Torre Finds Out and had this great bit of the importance of sports fandom that I've never heard anyone talk about before. You have to check it out.
I could recap it, but I won't do it justice.
"I'm not kidding when I say every time, for the rest of my life, I see Payton Pritchard's half-court buzzer-beater in Game 2 of the Finals, I will think about my son. I will cry."
— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) May 21, 2026
—Mike Schur on why sports make us cry pic.twitter.com/aR6unWflmy
As the Knicks go up 2-0 on the Cavs in the Eastern Conference Finals, there's an interesting study on the impact of rust in the NBA playoffs.
If rust was a concern, then teams returning from an extended break should struggle—particularly in Game 1s, before regaining their footing—but that’s not the case. The better-rested teams, as previously defined, have gone 42-23 in Game 1s with an average point differential of +6.8—nearly identical to their 44-21 record with an average margin of +5.5 in Game 2s of those same series.
This came out prior to the start of the series. It's holding up pretty well.
Lev Akabas
I know this isn't basketball-related, but it's my newsletter, dammit.
The Strand in Rockland is hosting their annual Summer Bash and this year's event is a must-attend if you're a film nerd like me. TCM's Eddie Muller, host of Noir Alley, will be in town for a reception and screening of the noir classic Woman on the Run.
If you haven't seen this one, it's pretty awesome.
Oh man.
The Stax Index, the formula I came up with to determine what should be the most entertaining game of the day, is essentially looking for a close, high-scoring game between two really good teams who will score a lot of points.
So let's go to Falmouth, where the boys' lax team will host Yarmouth in a game with a Stax Index of 94.9. That might be the highest number I've ever seen. It makes sense. #2 vs. #3 in the rankings. A projected margin of victory of under a goal. And two of the top 10 scoring offenses in the state. It's almost a perfect storm.
And there's seeding implications!
According to the Tourney Odds, it's basically a crapshoot between Falmouth, Yarmouth, and #1 Thornton Academy for the 1 seed in Class A.
You want to get the 1 seed here for all the obvious reasons, but 4/5 will probably be Edward Little and Deering. EL doesn't play any of the top 3 teams somehow and Deering went 0-3 against them with a margin of -6 goals/game.
So you'd love to get the winner of those two teams in the semifinals instead of the alternative. The winner here will get a leg up.
The Model's picks for the rest of today's games are after the jump.