The HAVES and HAVENOTS

 I apologize if Gramps is a day late and a dollar short.  I was going to give up rating teams this winter but decided to give it another go.  I spent the last nine months writing a book about Minnesota State HS Nordic skiing (I was a state champ back nearly 60 years ago) and just published it on Bookpatch.com.  You can look for it in the Bookpatch bookstore under Edmonson.

So I am about two-thirds of the way through boys basketball classes and have not started on the girls.  I may get two or three ratings posted for each class this year.  Don't expect any regularity.  You can check out some other good statistical ratings models when you don't see anything here.

I met Vianney assistant coach Craig Kennedy yesterday at the Coaches vs. Cancer tournament.  I have been doing some stats summaries for Eureka boys and girls for every team back to 1999 when the Post-Dispatch began summarizing basketball team statistics.  The trouble was, Eureka had some great basketball players before 1999 that were not getting recognition in the current career and season stats summaries.  John Jones, Jr. was the all-time scorer, rebounder and three point leader but was not on some season top ten summaries.  I found some old Post-Dispatch stats that helped fill in the blanks and Coach Kennedy, who is a stats freak too, told me he had stats back to the 1960s.  Might be another book?

When I introduced myself to Kennedy as "Gramps", his eyes lit up and he said, "Hey, we love your blog"!  I was a little surprised because I had written some brutally honest columns about how the star of Vianney's team, Luke Walsh, needed to tone down the court antics that put his recruitment in a bad light.  Coach (and father) Kevin Walsh, had even suspended Luke and another player for a CvC game last year, for on-court antics, leaving some D-1 coaches and scouts who attended the game, wondering if Luke was worthy of a scholarship.  Maybe the Vianney coaches were telling him the same thing. Luke seems to be playing an intense but antic-free game this season averaging 36 points a game and giving Vianney a shot at the MCC league title with De Smet and Chaminade, two dominating programs for many years.

That gets me to the title of the blog, The HAVES and the HAVENOTS.  I have noticed a much larger gap between the best teams in classes three through six and the worst teams in those respective classes.  The best teams in class six rank at a 145-155 rating while the worst are in the mid-80s.  That's a 60 point spread from best to worst.  The other classes have similar disparities with the top teams being 60 or 70 points better than the worst teams in their class.

What's the reason behind this?  A lot has to do with basketball tradition and feeder program sophistication.  Of course, the private schools can recruit and the best kids tend to opt for the better private programs.  On the public school side, feeder programs are critical to success.  Eureka has developed a feeder program with three or four boys and girls teams at each grade.  The Eureka freshman boys tryout had 50 kids try out.  50!  That says to me that the program is attracting talent.

I looked at yesterday's CvC scores and the HAVES had a heyday against the HAVENOTS.  I don't think I have seen 50 and 69 point margins at the CvC in the past 15 years.

I really admire high school coaches who can transform the incoming talent into a cohesive unit after losing half the team from graduating seniors.  It must be a daunting task to bring in a new group and still keep winning.  The schools with good pipelines don't seem to miss a beat.

Others, like Parkway West and Troy Buchanan, have hit some speed bumps after years of success.  I am not sure what the scenario or talent pool is, but those schools have dropped by 25 rating points from a year ago.  Hopefully they will rebound with the next class.  Some schools never seem to improve and continue to be at the bottom of the class ratings, year in and year out.

So, what does the CvC tournament look like?  Well, the CvC seeding committee must of done something right.  All of the top seeds won and moved on to the second round.  

Here's the results from yesterday and predicted spreads for today (and hopefully you will see more class ratings in early 2025).