Month: December 2017

Russians Go Gaga for Girls’ Basketball

The TeamBrunnhilde blog, which you are reading, is a moderated blog. Thus even tough the number of readers may exceed four, the profusion of comments generated by this multitude must be approved by the Blog Czar before they appear in the comments for the blog. So far only one (1) comment has made it through the gauntlet. I wonder what those other comments had to say.

Somebody, probably a Russian—at least his email domain name is Russian, wrote in Latin that he protested this. Exactly what ‘this’ is undefined. The kind of post where the poster is just checking to see if the post appears in the site. Included is a URL. Then I get a post, also from a Russian, letting me know that I am wrong and he can prove it just give him a call. That is basically all it said, the kind of reply that fits anywhere. You can write posting program to puke it out where it finds a niche. The Russian version of the Nigerian scam. A bunch of URLs follow. Most of those from Russian domains. My guess is they are all vectors for malware.

How could I resist this adoring comment from February? (also from a Russian):

Simply desire to say your article is as astonishing. The clearness in your post is just cool and i could assume you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission let me to grab your feed to keep up to date with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the rewarding work.

Sometimes I can tell at least one reason for the comment is to trick search ranking rules. Somebody wants to get a particular URL referred from as many sites as possible. Ergo, stick the URL into the comments on blogs, all over. Russians, yeah. Others too, maybe.

Funny also is the amount of hits on the site from Russia. Now I don’t get a lot of hits anyway. And a lot of hit are just bots. But even the bots—a bunch are from Russia. And the 404 errors. Somebody is trying to hit likely unpublished directories, hoping for a hit on a hidden login or something. And a bunch of these are from Russia.

How cum? They might not be Vladimir Putin, but they’re at least a bunch of crooks.

Rating Debut

Mondays are a light day at TeamBrunnhilde. No slate of Sunday games to enter into the database. Time to catch up on missing games from the previous weeks.

A new feature of the schedule pages are TeamBrunnhilde point rating differences of the teams playing. Early in the season, before this season’s points ratings are calculated and published, that difference is based on last season. Consider Dayton girls, 4th in state last year and ranked #1 for part of the season by AP. They scored two (2) points in their opener against River View. That’s falling off a cliff. Mercer Island girls, last year’s 3A champion, who regularly beat hapless teams last season finds itself on the other side of the ‘hap’ ratio, losing their last three by 41 point average. Bothell girls ranked #1 by WIAA RPI are also in dumps, although that slide may have begun before last season ended. And on the boys side, one-and-done Nathan Hale finds itself descending to customary status for that program now that Brandon Roy has set up shop at Garfield. So last year’s ratings may be misleading.

So when to publish ratings based on this season? The TeamBrunnhilde points rating needs teams to be ‘connected’ into a continuous set. Say we measure the distance between teams by games. The distance of teamA to teamA is 0. You probably would have guessed that. From teamA to teamB, which have played each other, are 1 game apart. TeamB’s opponents are 2 games away from teamA (provided that teamA has also not played them). Imagine then a tinker-toy structure. Teams are the hubs and games are the colored rods connecting them. Early in the season, there are few games per hub. At first, there are pairs of hubs connected by single rod. As more games are played more and more connections are made, and finally every hub is connected, via other hubs and games, to every other hub. But the whole structure is pretty rickety. Measuring the width of the whole set, it might be 15 games or so between some teams. And the number of path ways for that distance will be few. By the end of the season the distance between teams will be well under 10 with multiple paths of comparison.

Last Tuesday (December 5), complete connection of teams was achieved; teams that hadn’t played sufficient games to connect to anybody not included. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday added more games. So by now, after two weeks of data, one can pick up the tinker-toy construction of games and it doesn’t sag too badly. It will get better. It is likely better than applying last year’s ratings to this year’s teams.

Here are the initial rankings, broken out by gender and class. This week’s complete rankings are available for boys and girls.

Girls 4A

1 Kentridge 55.5
2 Moses Lake 52.5
3 Eastlake 49.2
4 Lake Stevens 46.2
5 Bellarmine Prep 46.0
6 Woodinville 43.3
7 University 43.1
8 Chiawana 41.4
9 Lewis and Clark 37.7
10 Skyline 35.5

Girls 3A

1 Kamiakin 53.0
2 Garfield 51.5
3 Lincoln 46.6
4 Bethel 46.0
5 West Seattle 45.1
6 Seattle Prep 39.0
7 Rainier Beach 37.4
8 Bellevue 35.5
9 Prairie 34.4
10 Snohomish 34.3

Girls 2A

1 W.F. West 49.0
2 East Valley (Spokane) 41.8
3 Archbishop Murphy 40.5
4 Wapato 40.2
5 Clarkston 31.0
6 Black Hills 30.0
7 Burlington-Edison 29.5
8 White River 28.2
9 Woodland 25.0
10 Washougal 24.7

Girls 1A

1 Lynden Christian 52.5
2 Zillah 52.4
3 Cashmere 44.8
4 La Salle 35.6
5 Medical Lake 35.0
6 Cle Elum-Roslyn 34.8
7 La Center 31.1
8 Meridian 26.4
9 Connell 24.8
10 Seattle Christian 23.9

Girls 2B

1 Davenport 37.3
2 Northwest Christian (Colbert) 29.7
3 Mabton 28.9
4 St. George’s 25.7
5 Ilwaco 25.3
6 Wahkiakum 20.1
7 Lind-Ritzville/Sprague 19.7
8 Colfax 18.6
9 Napavine 16.9
10 White Swan 14.4

Girls 1B

1 Sunnyside Christian 56.1
2 Colton 23.7
3 Pomeroy 17.8
4 Inchelium 14.6
5 Garfield-Palouse 14.4
6 Oakesdale 9.2
7 Touchet 8.9
8 Selkirk 7.4
9 Wellpinit 5.5
10 Neah Bay 2.0

Boys 4A

1 Federal Way 57.8
2 Gonzaga Prep 45.1
3 Enumclaw 44.9
4 Richland 41.0
5 Bothell 39.2
6 Kentwood 38.2
7 Auburn 37.2
8 Curtis 36.4
9 Kamiak 36.1
10 Union 34.6

Boys 3A

1 Seattle Prep 61.2
2 Garfield 60.2
3 Eastside Catholic 52.7
4 Wilson 52.6
5 Rainier Beach 51.9
6 O’Dea 49.5
7 Lincoln 48.1
8 Franklin 46.9
9 Cleveland 42.0
10 Lakeside (Seattle) 38.5

Boys 2A

1 Mountlake Terrace 50.1
2 Anacortes 36.4
3 Columbia River 35.6
4 Foss 33.6
5 Selah 31.8
6 Sedro-Woolley 31.4
7 Lynden 31.1
8 Mark Morris 28.4
9 Lakewood 27.3
10 Renton 27.0

Boys 1A

1 Lynden Christian 35.1
2 Bellevue Christian 21.0
3 Montesano 19.6
4 King’s 17.4
5 Northwest School 13.4
6 Nooksack Valley 11.2
7 Freeman 10.1
8 Okanogan 9.6
9 South Whidbey 8.9
10 Mount Baker 8.4

Boys 2B

1 Winlock 23.0
2 Toutle Lake 22.1
3 Life Christian 21.5
4 Adna 14.6
5 Napavine 13.9
6 St. George’s 13.7
7 Brewster 13.1
8 Morton-White Pass 7.0
9 Toledo 3.7
10 Wahkiakum -3.3

Boys 1B

1 Sunnyside Christian 12.9
2 Muckleshoot 9.6
3 Yakama Tribal 8.6
4 Odessa 3.7
5 Cedar Park Christian (Mountlake Terrace) 0.7
6 Pomeroy -1.9
7 Naselle -5.5
8 Wellpinit -6.2
9 Tacoma Baptist -8.3
10 Mount Rainier Lutheran -8.4

On oddity is that the overall top girls team is Sunnyside Christian, a 1B school. This is likely an early-season artifact due to the paucity of games played. Sunnyside Christian had played only White Swan and Mabton. The latter two have only played, besides Sunnyside Christian, 1A teams from the SCAC. The SCAC has #6, #26, #31 overall (out of 357 teams with point ratings). This is likely due to a very small sample size of game connecting that set of teams with the rest of the set. So if one is inferring that Sunnyside Christian would beat Kentridge, the initial #2 team, don’t bet the mortgage money on that. However, within the SCAC the estimates are likely more reliable. Note also that Central Valley girls have played only one game so is not included in the TB point rating. Several other teams also fall into that category.