By Howard Tsumura
LANGLEY — Putting a bit of a microscope to our third week of B.C. Basketball Metrics numbers is proving to generate all kinds of fun, stats-driven questions.
We’ll start out with the biggest news in terms of movement this past week, with a look at the Quad-A, Triple-A and Double-A scenes.
Then, we’ll look at which team could potentially be in the position to earn it’s tier’s single wildcard berth — officially known as strength berths — to the provincial championships if they were set to start say, this Wednesday instead their actual March 4 date at the LEC.
This past week:
*At Quad-A, Surrey’s Panorama Ridge Thunder improved a B.C.-best six spots to No. 6, pushing its league record in the South Fraser to a perfect 9-0 highlighted by its 81-74 win over rival Tamanawis on Thursday.
*At Triple-A, Byrne Creek turbo-charged its combined team rating (CTR) to the tune of a tier-best four-spot climb after winning all four of its games to finish first in Abbotsford on Saturday at the Rick Hansen Invitational.
The Bulldogs’ final three wins at the event were all against BCBBM Top 16 teams in Double-A’s Surrey Christian Falcons, and Triple-A’s Wellington Wildcats of Nanaimo and Surrey’s Enver Creek Cougars.
Byrne Creek beat Enver Creek 78-72 in the championship game.
*At Double-A, Vancouver’s Notre Dame Jugglers beat West Van’s Collingwood Cavaliers in the championship final of the Pacific Academy Breakers Invitational Saturday in Surrey, a one-v-two clash which results in a flip-flop a the very top for B.C.’s top-rated schools heading into the postseason.
WHO COULD IT BE NOW?
A quartet of B.C. School Sports committee will be selecting one ‘strength-berth’ team in each tier to complete this season’s 16-team B.C. championship field.
There is, of course, the small matter of playing your most important games of the season between now and the end of February.
Teams that today may look like they’re in, could well be out. And those on the fringes now could find themselves punching Big Dance tickets in a swell of momentum they’ll remember the rest of their lives. That is what the second season is all about.
But if those choices had to happen today what might they potentially look like?
With all of this in mind, using BCBBM’s Combined Team Rating number as a guide, I sifted out the teams with the five best scores who this week sat outside their respective B.C. tourney fields based on the number of provincial berths there respective zones have been allocated.
Each of B.C. School Sports’ four individual tier committees will be entrusted with determining the 16th-and-final team in each B.C. tournament pool. In its literature, it describes the strength berth thusly: “The final berth is the strength berth, awarded to the zone (not a specific team) with the highest competitive strength demonstrated relative to its initial berth allocation.”
Your reporter is not attempting to try and follow the rest of the fine print that is part of the guiding principles they will consider in making a decision that, like so much else in life, will please some and upset others.
Instead, this is all meant to function as a first sketch of what the final team added to each tier’s B.C. tourney field MIGHT look like. It’s not meant to inflame, belittle, over-dramatize or attempt to tell any concrete truths.
Like the B.C. Top 10 rankings, it is an exercise meant to educate and inform, and in the end generate discussion of this grand game among its faithful fan base. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I’ll post each tier’s “five teams on the bubble” after each tier’s BCBBM numbers from 4A down to 1A.
Enjoy and I’ll be back again Wednesday with the official B.C. Top 10s.
-Howard
QUAD A
TOP 16
BEST BY ZONE
TOP FIVE 4A LOOKING IN
Kitsilano 61
Rutland 60
Grandview Heights 52
Sir Winston Churchill 44
Mt. Boucherie 41
TRIPLE A
TOP 16
BEST BY ZONE
TOP FIVE 3A LOOKING IN
Wellington 38
College Heights 27
Mark Isfeld 35
Duchess Park 33
Richmond 32
DOUBLE A
TOP 16
BEST BY ZONE
TOP FIVE 2A LOOKING IN
King George 43
Abbotsford Traditional 41
St. Thomas Aquinas 33
Langley Christian 30
Nechako Valley 30
SINGLE A
TOP 16
BEST BY ZONE
TOP FIVE 1A LOOKING IN
Nisga’a 7
Similkameen -1
King David -3
Aberdeen Hall -8
Chetwynd -12
(Images provided for Varsity Letters by B.C. Basketball Metrics 2026. All Rights Reserved)
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Strength of berth. – Take the top two or three teams that do not make it into the provincials and are the next best teams and play in a play in tournament.
It’s simple, eliminates subjective facts and figures and leaves it in the teams hands to qualify!
Don’t make excuses, it can be done, truly fair and simple.