With one fewer team in the NLL this season, 23 players who were good enough to play in the NLL last year are now out of work. Could we put together an NLL-calibre team with the players not listed on one of the recently-released 2012 rosters? Let’s have a look.

I started with everyone listed in an Out list on my roster change summary who wasn’t also on an In, Holdout, IR, or PUP list and who hasn’t (to my knowledge) officially retired, added in the former Blazers players who are not on a roster, and then narrowed it down. Note that some of these guys are playing in CLax or the NALL, or are not playing on an NLL team for some other reason (i.e. they were not cut).

Forwards

Ryan Boyle
Craig Conn
Nick Cotter
Pat Maddalena
Connor Martin
Ryan Powell
Jamie Rooney
Brendan Thenhaus

Transition

Brock Boyle
Nick Carlson
Jamison Koesterer
Bobby McBride

Defenders

Scott Ditzell
Kevin Fines
Steve Forsythe
Clay Hill
Travis Irving
Pat Jones
David Morgan
Eric Pacey
Noah Talbot

Goalies

Matt Disher
Matt King

Obviously there’s no Doyle / Grant / Dawson type superstar players, but that looks to me like a pretty good lineup. A decent offense, lots of experience on the back end and in transition, a great face-off guy, and two goalies named Matt. These guys aren’t going to be challenging for the Cup this year, but there have been real NLL teams (Cobras, Rebel, Smash, early Rush) that won fewer games than this group would.

Update: Alex Turner should be on this team as well. Not sure how I missed him. If I had to replace one of the forwards with Turner, it’d probably be Maddalena or Martin.