Oceanside cruises past the Windjammers

Let's start with the Game of the Day, which was quickly downgraded when news broke that Camden standout Thea Laukka would miss the game with illness.

Camden hung around for a bit, then Olivia Breen hit this three late in the first quarter.

The Mariners extended the lead in the second quarter with some hot shooting from deep. They survived some foul trouble by Breen and took a 13 point lead into the half. It was pretty much over from there and Oceanside cruised. The win moved them to first in B South.

In the other Game of the Day option up North, the Caribou boys came out hot with Owen Corrigan scoring 13 of his 22 in the first quarter and the Vikings rolled to a comfortable win over Mattanawcook, 70-51.

Elsewhere

Khaelon Watkins had 23 points in Cheverus' win over Westbrook...Madison's Dakota Estes had 14 in a dominant win over Lisbon...Abigail McCarty drained 4 3s in Mt. Abram's win over Oak Hill...Addison Cyr had 21 & 12 in Mattanawcook's win over Caribou.

The win moves Oceanside up to #3 in the Power Rankings, which are updated!

This is one of the better dunks you'll see.

That's Ben Hanke with the jam and BL Lippert and Shawn Totman on the call for Cony's broadcast team. They do a fantastic job.

I'd like to remind everyone that I very much enjoy sharing videos of athletes around the state doing fantastic things--buzzer beaters, dunks, you name it.

Tourney Odds

As promised, Tourney Odds are now live. Tourney Odds are probably the most popular feature on the website and also the most complicated. If you're new here, the short explanation is that Tourney Odds utilize a Monte Carlo simulation that uses a random number generator to simulate the rest of the season. If the Model thinks you have a 60% chance of winning a game, you'll win it in 60% of the simulations. But it will also find simulations where your team pulls off the biggest upset in school history and simulate the Heal Points with that result.

It then repeats the process 10,000 times, which allows it to find outlier scenarios where the Valley boys lose 9 games this year. Spoiler: the Valley boys aren't going to lose 9 games this year.

The result is the range of possible seedings. In B North girls, you can see that Lawrence could be anywhere from the 1 seed (48.6% of simulations) to the 7 (0.3% of simulations.

If you hover on Old Town, you can see their best-case scenario for Heal Points (212.5), worst-case scenario (90.6), and the likelihood they finish with various Win-Loss records. Most likely they finish somewhere between 14-4 and 12-6, but they could do as badly as 8-10 and in those 8-10 seasons, they make the playoffs 87.5% of the time. At 11-7 they make the tournament every time, so that's their current target.

In previous years, the Tourney Odds used 1,000 simulations and took about 3 hours to run (it was such a hassle). This year, I utilized the AI program Claude to build a Python script that does each gender in roughly 7 minutes. A huge improvement! The caveat to that is I can't go under the hood and find mistakes as easily--and there's a couple to uncover--although I'm sure it'll be easy to point them out to the AI so it can fix them.

This is, I think, the 7th year with Tourney Odds and I can't remember a situation where it declared a team "OUT" that make the tourney or vice-versa. It did once have Brewer at 5% to make the tourney on the final day of the regular season and they threaded the needle. So if it says you're IN, you're in. If it says you're OUT, you're out.

There are currently 6 teams that are OUT.

This is obviously behind the paywall.

Cooper Flagg is your Western Conference Rookie of the Month for December.

Let's take a look at the updated results of the Wins Draft.

Tyler's in the lead with 47 wins, but I will point out that I have the fewest losses.

We just did this a couple of days ago, but the schedule is light.

All the way back on New Year's Eve, Maranacook was favored by roughly 4.5 in Maddie Grimaldi's first game back from an ACL injury. On the neutral floor of the ACC, Spruce won by 9 behind 14 from Grimaldi.

Since then, Spruce has a blowout win over Winslow and Maranacook dropped a game to Cony and the line for the rematch is 1.2 in the Phoenix's favor. I think that's probably low, but Maranacook's gym can be a difficult place to play.

The Model's picks for the rest of today's games are after the jump.