Both the semi-final series had Game one last Friday, which I wrote about here. Sunday featured Game two of each, with Albany hosting the Seals and Buffalo hosting the Rock. The visiting teams won the Friday night games, so in order for either series to continue to game three, we needed the visiting teams to do the same on Sunday. But it was not to be.
Seals vs. FireWolves, Game 2
Games one and two in this series looked fairly similar. The FireWolves defense was very frustrating for San Diego as we saw a number of Seals offensive players running off the floor shaking their heads, trying to figure out what they did wrong. Much of the time, the answer was… nothing. They did everything right, but the shot was blocked by an Albany defender or stopped by Doug Jamieson, who had another amazing game. Some players just step up their games in the playoffs, and it appears that Doug Jamieson is one of those players. His career playoff GAA is 9.26, almost two full points lower than his regular season GAA (11.22), and his playoff save percentage is 83%, 4½ points higher than his regular season percentage (78.5%).
Faceoff battles were frequently long and drawn out, and likely very tiring for Joe Nardella and Trevor Baptiste. The initial clamp on the ball is all about reaction time and wrist speed, but if both players clamp at the same time, it’s all about full body strength. I saw one faceoff where Nardella was pushing so hard that Baptiste started sliding backwards. Baptiste weighs 230 pounds and was pushing back with every ounce of strength he had. Nardella is 190 pounds.
Nardella vs. Baptiste
San Diego took an early 2-0 lead but Albany fought back and led 3-2 at the end of the first quarter. In each of the second and third quarters, San Diego scored first to tie the game but Albany re-took the lead less than a minute later. In the fourth, the FireWolves built up a 4-goal lead but the Seals started to claw back into it. Austin Staats scored two and Dane Dobbie one in the fourth, but they couldn’t get closer than two goals back and Albany completed the sweep. The FireWolves, who won all of three games last season and finished last in the league, are now in the NLL Championship finals. If they win, they will become only the second team in NLL history to miss the playoffs one year and win the Championship the next. But even if they don’t win, their turnaround in a single season has been unbelievable.
There were a ton of penalties in this game, including a very controversial major in the third quarter. Austin Staats hit Jackson Nishimura with a blindside hit and was given a major for an illegal bodycheck. It looked to me like Staats’s shoulder hit Nishimura in the head, but a lot of people on Twitter (knowledgeable people, including several former NLL players) said they thought it was clean. A slow replay did appear to show that the hit was initially to Nishimura’s chest or shoulder, and maybe slid upwards into his face. Nishimura was seen repeatedly wiping blood off of his face for the next couple of minutes, but he was able to return to the game.
So maybe that part was clean. But I also had to wonder whether the fact that Nishimura couldn’t have seen the hit coming was the reason that the major penalty was upheld after review. The Illegal Bodychecking rule in the rule book states:
Note the highlighted text: “Officials shall consider the positioning of players when contact is initiated, specifically whether the player being checked is in a vulnerable and/or defenseless position, which may include a player’s head being down or being unaware of an impending hit, and significant distance travelled by the player making the hit.” His head wasn’t down, and Staats didn’t travel a significant distance (he took maybe three steps), but the rule book makes a point of saying that if a player is unaware of an impending hit, an otherwise legal check could be considered illegal. Maybe that’s why the refs called it.
That said, someone from Lacrosse Culture Daily (a group consisting of current NLL players that hosts some of the top NLL podcasts) said this in a short conversation we had:
That’s my point. He should have known. Players like Staats pressure the breakout all the time. Very normal play that happens dozens of times per game. If you make a bad decision like catching the ball in the middle of the floor and immediately turning up floor in a contact sport, then take some responsibility. We’re going to get to a point where a player can just get the ball and run backwards down the floor and no one can touch him because he can’t see anyone coming and the refs will protect him.
Every single current or former NLL player who commented on that play said that the hit was legal and shouldn’t have been penalized. If you’re going to consider someone’s opinion on a lacrosse play and your choices are (1) players in the league or (2) me with a rule book, go with the former.
As controversial as that hit and penalty were, there was another play in the game involving Staats that was much worse and less controversial. With about ten seconds left in the game, Staats got angry at a through-the-crease call on him (OK, he was probably angry about other things too), and cross checked an unsuspecting Anthony Joaquim in the head. Staats got a match penalty for cross-checking as well as a major for roughing. He will likely be suspended for some number of games at the beginning of next season. Luckily Joaquim seemed to be OK.
Staats is obviously an incredibly talented player and plays with a lot of emotion. Sometimes that emotion is a good thing and gets him and his teammates fired up. Sometimes it’s just fun to watch (nobody loves scoring goals more than Austin Staats), but if the emotion is negative, sometimes it’s just too much and he has trouble keeping it under control. This isn’t his first suspension in the NLL, he was suspended by the PLL as well, and Staats has led the Seals in penalty minutes in two of the last three seasons. For many players, you’d have to start thinking about whether the pluses of having him on your roster outweigh the minuses. Staats did score 50+ goals this season, so the answer is probably “yes, they do”, but he still needs to work on that discipline. The more suspensions you get in your career, the longer they tend to be and it won’t take long before the answer to that pluses and minuses question may change.
In the Awesome category, Dane Dobbie scored three goals to bring his career playoff goal total to 85. With that third goal, Dobbie set the NLL record for career playoff goals, passing John Tavares who had 84. Dobbie’s teammate Curtis Dickson is third on that list with 70, and the only other active player in the top ten is Dhane Smith, tied with Dan Dawson for seventh with 59. Congrats to Dobbie on that achievement, though given that the Seals are done for the year, I’m sure he doesn’t care one iota about that right now.
Rock vs. Bandits, Game 2
I did look into getting tickets for this game but I clearly waited too long as the only tickets available were deep in the upper bowl, or resale tickets in the lower bowl for $200+ each. In the end, I’m kinda glad I didn’t go.
The Rock offense looked a lot more settled and confident in game two, and it was less than forty minutes into the game before they scored, so that was a plus. Both defenses played very strong and Rose and Vinc both started out strong as well. The Rock kept Buffalo off the board for the entire second quarter while putting up four of their own, and a minute and a half into the fourth quarter, Mark Matthews scored to give the Rock a four-goal lead. But that Matthews goal was the last goal the Rock would score in the 2024 NLL season. It’s not that the Rock took their foot off the gas, but just like Friday, Matt Vinc and the Buffalo D just would not allow anything, and the Rock of the fourth quarter ended up looking a little more like the Rock of Friday night.
So the Rock offense was definitely different on Sunday than on Friday. But the rest was kinda the same. Rose and the Rock defense was very good, but against the Bandits there was only so much they could do. Byrne and Smith were kept to reasonable numbers (2+5 and 2+4 respectively) but the rest of the Bandits offense stepped up. Vinc and the defense were excellent, and in the fourth quarter, they were borderline untouchable.
This game was a good example of how solid goaltending and defense drives the offense, and good offense drives the back end as well. When the Bandits were down by four early in the fourth, Chase Fraser scored and then Nanticoke scored a minute after that. Those goals gave the Bandits the spark they needed to think “we’re not out of this game yet”, and that’s when Vinc seemed to up his game even higher than it was. The offense, seeing Vinc making these amazing saves, realized that as long as Vinc is playing like that, we just need a couple more goals and we can win this. Each fed off the other, which led to the Bandits win.
So it’s Albany hosting Buffalo in the finals. The FireWolves have never been to the finals. Before they were in Albany, they were the New England Black Wolves, who also never went to the finals, and before that they were the old Philadelphia Wings. The Wings won six Championships in nine appearances, their wins coming in 1989, 1990, 1994, 1995, 1998, and 2001. The Bandits have been to the dance an incredible 13 times, winning five of them, in 1992, 1993, 1996, 2008, and of course 2023.
If I were forced to make a prediction on the finals, I’d have to say Buffalo since they are absolutely firing on all cylinders. They had some rough patches during the season but are playing as well now as they did last year. It’s hard to imagine anyone being able to stop them. But then again, I’ve underestimated the FireWolves more than once this season and they’ve proven me wrong time and time again. This will be a great series and the only downside is that we have to wait almost two weeks for it to begin.
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