After winning just two games last season, the Bangor High School boys basketball team struggled to meet expectations of improving this year, finishing with a 1-18 record and losing by 42 points in the first round of the Class AA North playoffs.
The Rams’ 81-39 loss to Cheverus last Friday was its most lopsided loss of the 2023-24 season, in which they averaged 24 turnovers and conceded roughly 13.5 offensive rebounds per game, getting outscored by an average margin of 19.4 points.
Yet Bangor was king of Maine boys basketball just five years ago, when first-year head coach Brad Libby and Mr. Basketball Matt Fleming led the 2018-19 Rams to their 13th state title in school history — tied with South Portland for the most in Maine, across all five classes.
Since then, Libby and company have struggled to return to championship form, winning just one playoff game and going 9-47 the past three years. Facing a lack of size, synergy and ball control, the rebuild hasn’t materialized, but Libby remains optimistic about the future of Bangor boys basketball.
“Being the head of a program, you expect people to point fingers, and I’m good with that. We didn’t perform to the fashion I want or the community wants, but you have to understand that these things come in waves, and that you’re dealing with kids that have a lot of pressure on them,” Libby said.
“It’s a process. We found a lot of success early on, but since then we’ve had a wave of graduations; two years ago we graduated 11 of our 14 varsity players. In AA basketball, physicality is a big thing, and we didn’t have the strength we needed to compete. Our Achilles heels were turnovers and offensive rebounds — we have to get stronger with the ball, be more confident with the ball, and develop some fundamental skills.”
In 2018-19, the Rams were stacked with size and experience, including 6-foot-6 Fleming who played at West Point and the University of Maine, 6-foot-8 junior Sam Martin who currently plays at UMaine-Augusta, and 6-foot-5 Henry Westritch who currently plays at Colby College in Waterville.
This year, the Rams varsity team featured six seniors, one junior, seven sophomores and one freshman — including three starters that were six-feet or shorter and just two players on the roster that were 6-foot-4 or taller.
“I’m big into the mathematics of basketball, and if you look at our stats, we averaged 1.2 points per possession in which we [took] a shot,” Libby said. “If we cut [the turnovers] in half, that’s 15 to 18 extra points per game. All those turnovers and offensive rebounds are just extra possessions for the opponent.”
But against smaller and more manageable Class A opponents in Brewer, Hampden, Skowhegan and Nokomis, the Rams still went just 1-5 overall. Bangor’s one win came against 4-14 Brewer, with whom they split the season series, on Jan. 9 by a score of 64-57.
Bangor’s relative lack of size might have played a smaller role in these losses to Class A opposition if they had played more consistently as a team.
Bangor senior Ryan Ford transferred to Bangor from Brewer prior to his junior year, and was the Rams’ leading scorer this season. He perceived a lack of continuity in Bangor’s feeder system compared with Brewer, which won the Class A state championship last season.
“If you look at that [championship] team from Brewer, those kids had been playing with each other since third grade, they grew up with their parents being their coaches all the way until their senior years even, and they were all good friends,” Ford said. “Bangor has limited to none of that. I think smaller towns have a great opportunity to build programs from a young age for sure.”
Libby provided a different explanation for the Rams’ lack of chemistry this season.
“It’s always tough when you have six seniors and we went down and you have [seven] sophomores,” Libby said. “They’re a couple years apart from each other, and probably interested in different things. But I think they did a good job late in the year doing team activities, [like] going to dinner together or supporting the freshman and JV teams.”
Nevertheless, it remains unclear how Bangor’s rising sophomores and incoming freshmen will augment the team’s talent and chemistry levels, but the Rams have no choice but to remain faithful.
Based on the recent success of Bangor’s middle school travel team, Libby genuinely does hold faith in the future of Bangor high school basketball.
“Our eighth-grade group coming in is very, very talented. That seventh- and eighth-grade travel program that we have was winning championships this year,” Libby said. “We’re definitely excited about the future of the Bangor Rams. We’ve been successful doing what we do because we fully believe in [our] philosophy, and we’ve been lucky enough to cut down nets in the past — we fully expect to do that again in the future at Bangor.”
