Talking Sports: Making the points

One of my favorite downtime activities of late is to wander through the basketball section of the NSAA website and scan through that portion labled, "Points Leaders by Class." As the season gets later and later it becomes a more and more interesting occupation.

Too bad there isn't a little more down time.

Considering the eight Nebraska teams (four girls and four boys teams) in the coverage area of the Sidney Sun-Telegraph, the Class B6 boys race is the most fascinating. There's been a battle all season long among three Class B6 teams in the top 10 of the list.

Several other local teams are in the top 20, including the Sidney girls (13th Class B), Leyton girls (14th Class D2) and Leyton boys (13th Class D2). Beware too of the Creek Valley girls in D1. They're 30th, but dangerous from what I've seen.

By the way, the Class B6 Gering girls are 12th - one notch ahead of district rival Sidney, which makes tomorrow night doubly important for Raiders fans.

The Sidney and Gering girls have only met once this season. The Raiders handled the Bulldogs 39-31 on Jan. 10, at home.

Before getting to the list, first a little advice for any basketball fans out there. Any basketball fans: Nuggets fans, Husker fans, March Madness fans - just fans of exciting and competitive basketball played by talented, well coached and evenly matched teams. If you feel you have to watch the Nuggets or the Huskers on television this weekend, set the DVR instead and try out some live Sidney High School basketball.

The Sidney boys have another big weekend coming up. It begins in Gering at 7 p.m. tomorrow night against the Bulldogs. They will follow the girls who are slated to get started at 5:30 p.m. The following night the boys are back at the Cabela's Athletic Facility to face the Bearcats of Scottsbluff.

The cost of a high school basketball game is generally $5 and there are no long drives to Lincoln or Denver. The trip to Gering after a long day at work may be more than a casual fan will do. But certainly there will be enough recovery time to catch the Sidney-Scottsbluff game on Saturday at Sidney.

Back to the NSAA points list. The list, as best as I understand it, is largely used for playoff seedings. The organization awards "power points," as it were--for wins and losses, based in part upon the assumed strength (and class) of the opposing team.

For me it's like looking at the USA Today Top-25 list in college football. The list isn't perfect. It's some kind of a mathematical calculation based on data fed into a computer or calculator.

Of course basketball is played by humans not numbers. But it seems like a reasonably competent computation of the realative strength of one team versus another.

So if the list has any merit at all you should be getting pretty excited about the upcoming weekend. Scottsbluff (10-5) is rated 5th on the Class B ledger, with a point total of 43.4667. Sidney (13-4) and Gering (12-5) are deadlocked in 6th with their mark sitting at 43.1765.

The top four on the list (Elkhorn South, Beatrice, Omaha Skutt Catholic and York) are all from the east.

But those are just the numbers. The excitement these three have generated when facing each other has already been intense. The Red Raiders are 5-1 in District B6 play so far this year, with their only loss being to Scottsbluff early in the 2013-14 campaign.

That loss was avenged on the first day of this month when Sidney held off the Bearcats second half charge in Scottsbluff. The Bearcats are 3-2 in district play with losses to Gering and Sidney. Gering is also 3-2 in B6 with losses to the Bearcats and Raiders.

I'm not an Xs and Os type of sports fan. I never have been. I confess I wouldn't be much good as a color analyst. I'll leave that up to Coach Erik Kohl. He's a math teacher by day and a knowledgable basketball man so we can all feel comfortable leaving that up to him.

To me sports is about the emotions and the excitement that comes with competition. That excitement reaches its highest pitch when two evenly matched teams are preparing to meet. Add a third team to that mix and the excitement is off the charts.

For Sidney to be facing Gering and Scottsbluff on back-to-back nights - well that's as good as it gets.