How Heal points work
Heal points decide who makes Maine's high school basketball tournament and where each team is seeded. Here's the whole method in two steps, a worked example, and a calculator.
Step 1: the preliminary index
Every win earns points based on the class of the team you beat. Add them up and divide by the number of games on your schedule, not games played so far. A team with no wins gets 1.000.
| Win over | Points |
|---|---|
| Class A team | 40 |
| Class B team | 38 |
| Class C team | 36 |
| Class D team | 34 |
| Class S team | 32 |
Basketball schedules have 12 to 18 countable games. Ties don't happen in basketball; in sports where they do, a tie earns half the points.
Step 2: the tournament index
Add up the preliminary indexes of every team you beat. Divide by games on your schedule, then multiply by 10. That's the number regions are ranked by. A win over a team that wins a lot is worth far more than a win over a team that rarely does.
Worked example
A team with an 18-game schedule beats three Class A teams, four Class B, two Class C and one Class D.
Preliminary index = (3×40 + 4×38 + 2×36 + 1×34) ÷ 18 = 378 ÷ 18 = 21.000
Say the ten teams it beat have preliminary indexes of 24.5, 21.0, 18.4, 26.2, 15.0, 12.8, 19.9, 22.3, 9.6, 11.7. They add up to 181.4.
Tournament index = 181.4 ÷ 18 × 10 = 100.7778
(Made-up numbers to show the math; not a real team.) Preliminary indexes are carried to 10 decimal places and shown to 3; tournament indexes to 12 and shown to 4.
Try it
Preliminary index
Tournament index
Who qualifies
Two-thirds of each region make the tournament, rounded up, and every bracket is filled to eight teams. If a region has fewer than eight teams, all of them go. Ties in the final standings are broken by the basketball committee (head-to-head, a coin toss or a lottery).
Source: MPA Handbook, Appendix K "Heal Point System" and the Countable Competitions Policy. The MPA keeps the official Heal point standings; niftiIQ recomputes them from public results and checks against the official table.