The 2026 trade deadline was this past Monday and once the trades started being announced, it seemed like they just wouldn’t stop. No real blockbusters, but there were a couple of significant deals and a number of smaller trades as well. Las Vegas made a number of moves to improve their team while Philadelphia were clearly sellers.
Then there were the seven games on the weekend. We began with an OT thriller on Friday night and ended with two games decided by seven goals.
There are players in the NLL who seem to move around almost every year. Callum Crawford and Mat Giles played for 12 teams each, and Ryan Benesch is running out of body space for the tattoos he gets of each team he plays for. But there are others who have played every game of their NLL career with the same franchise. Today we’re going to take a look at the top ten single-franchise players in NLL history.
Week 15 wasn’t nearly as busy as week 14, but there were some important results this past weekend. The Rock and Thunderbirds had their offenses working while Colorado and Rochester didn’t, and the FireWolves held off a late surge by the Wings. Next week features a few matchups between teams near each other in the standings: Toronto at Halifax, Philly at Oshawa, Vancouver at Georgia, and Rochester at Las Vegas. Colorado and Buffalo aren’t really near each other in the standings but the way Buffalo has been playing lately, they might be before long. Only San Diego at Saskatchewan and Ottawa at Calgary feature two teams not really near each other in the standings, but would it really shock anyone if the underdogs take those games?
There were ten games this past weekend, which ties for second place among the busiest weekends in NLL history – the last weekend of the 2007 season featured eleven games. Every team played, a bunch of teams played twice, and yet the standings didn’t change an awful lot. The Black Bears, Bandits, and Wings jumped, while the Rock, Seals, Desert Dogs, and Knighthawks dropped but even so, the jumps or drops weren’t huge.
Only four games this past weekend, but they all made my Awesome list in one form or another. If you’ve got some time and you didn’t see any of them, head on over to NLL+ (or TSN.ca in Canada*) and check them out. You will not be disappointed.
This was a really entertaining game. It was close with a few lead changes and only a couple of leads of as much as two until the very end. I was going to list this game under the Awesome section of my weekly report, but it got kind of long so I split it out.
We are officially at the halfway point of the season, as every team has now played at least nine games. The Rush are now tied for the fourth-longest single-season winning streak at eight games, the Mammoth are right behind them with a seven-game streak, and the Swarm have won five in a row. At the other end of the spectrum are the Knighthawks and Thunderbirds, who have each lost four straight, and the FireWolves with a five-game losing streak.
Lots of Awesomes and only a couple of Not Awesomes this week, so let’s get to it.
I would guess that nobody is shocked at most of the game results this week, other than maybe the game in Banditland (which I guess was more unexpected than shocking). The Warriors beating the Knighthawks isn’t shocking (they did it last week too), but the final score was a bit surprising. The Rock and Swarm took early leads and won, the Seals and Roughnecks took early leads and lost. As always, there were a few things that were awesome, and a few that weren’t.
A crazy high-scoring weekend with seven games, only two of which were settled by less than six goals. There were goals and hits and injuries and controversy. The Desert Dogs are an offensive powerhouse and the Bandits have suspect defense. The world has gone crazy.
The incident happened a little over twelve hours ago as I write this, and there are already tons of posts all over social media talking about it. Many are condemning the hit, others saying it was a legal hit blown out of proportion, and still others saying we need more of it in the game. Sorry folks, but this will be #1 in that list. It started out as a Not Awesome on my weekly report but quickly got long enough that I felt it deserved its own article.
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