Valley is Legit
The Cavaliers put on a show.
Somehow, I found myself in Wiscasset.
I've written before about the Wiscasset rebuild, culminating this weekend with a win over Forest Hills, and when I looked at the schedule yesterday, suddenly the Valley/Wiscasset game looked interesting. A great chance to get first-hand eyes on the rebuild, with the added bonus of seeing a Valley team that figures to contend for the Gold Ball in D.
It turns out I wasn't the only person there for that reason.
Valley came out hot, eager to impose their will on the game. You'll see this sometimes when an established team plays a team on the rise, an extra burst to show them who's the big brother. Valley was very quickly up 9-0. Wiscasset righted the ship, Landin Shirey hit a couple of threes (he finished with 17) and the Wolverines held serve for the rest of the quarter.
And then Wiscasset went ice cold from the floor. Or, more accurately, Valley made Wiscasset go ice cold from the floor. Valley's defense got Wiscasset sped up and out of their rhythm and discombobulated. Wiscasset went a good 7 minutes without scoring in the second quarter and from there the game was pretty much over.
Valley held Wiscasset to 25% from the floor and forced 20 turnovers.
I kept live stats for this one, which I've been doing (wifi dependent!).
Lucas McNelly
The real takeaway was Valley. They're legit.
Fisher Tewksbury led the way with 19 & 10. Hunter Mills added 11 & 10. But the real star was Harry Louis. I hadn't seen him live before and he's a real revelation. He controls the game on both ends, sees the floor really well, and does a lot of the little things. He had 12 points, 8 rebounds, 5 assists, and 4 steals and you never got the sense that he cared about his stats. He just ran the offense and did what needed to be done. It was very impressive. And I know it's Class D, but there's not a lot of teams in this state where he wouldn't be the starting PG and none where he wouldn't be in the rotation.
If you're Wiscasset, it's easy to get discouraged by a result like this, but rebuilds are hard and take time and Valley is really, really good. They went early in our Wins Draft for a reason and you could easily see them winning the whole thing. There was a postgame comment I thought was fitting: Valley might only get tested in a holiday tournament this year. Or in the Gold Ball game. They're that good.
Elsewhere:
Cape Elizabeth rallied down 19 at the half to stun Freeport. Eli Smith led Cape with 23...Jaxson Desjardins' 21 wasn't enough for Forest Hills against Carrabec and Forest Hills has lost 2 straight...Jed Alsup had 26 & 14 as Waynflete blew out NYA...Celia Bergdahl had 18 & 10 in Maranacook's win over Mount Abram...Central's Mary Allen nearly got a quintuple double. She ended up with 11 assists, 10 blocks, 9 rebounds, 9 steals, and 9 points...Kaitlyn Frost's 14 led Monmouth past Oak Hill...Madeline Hill had 24 and Liana Hartwell juuuuust missed a triple-double (9p/10r/11s) as Valley rolled...the Windham girls rallied late to beat Edward Little...Ella Rice had 23 in Winthrop's win over Mountain Valley.
Are Instagram highlight reels & cherry picked stat lines good for high school basketball or a short term benefit to the individual player?
ā CoachHuntington š (@SEHuntington13) December 17, 2024
I love the promotion of Maine HS players, but I also feel stat lines and highlight reels are driving a wrong way to play the game.
Iām old.
I can see both sides of this. On the one hand, this newsletter is basically promoting players and probably features a lot of cherry-picked stat lines. But there's an element of the whole thing that can be very toxic on Instagram and whatnot. There's a whole power dynamic of who does and does not get featured and, yeah. It's not great.
On the podcast, I dug into the Easton fight a little bit. We were calling it the Ashland/Easton fight, but it turns out it was just some idiots from Easton fighting each other.
I think I'm going to try and do a weekly episode summarizing a couple of things from the previous week and then going over the top 10 in the Power Rankings.
As always, you can listen on Spotify (and not look at me).
Hardwood Paroxysm is one of the smartest basketball accounts on Twitter and this article about the Celtics is fantastic.
Hardwood Paroxysm
Lincoln Academy was one of the feel-good stories of last year. They turned around a program that had recently been 1-17 into the 2 seed in B South and went all the way to the Regional Final. But they graduated nearly everyone and it's fair to wonder if they can sustain last season's success.
So far, they're 3-0, but against a schedule that's suspect.
They'll face their first real test in a rivalry game against Medomak Valley.
LCTV.org will have the live stream of this one. I'll have live stats.
The rest of today's picks are after the jump.