A light week in the NLL with only three games, and yet thanks to the holidays I’m still getting this article up several days late. Apologies for my tardiness but on the upside, there are no Not Awesomes this week! I mean, there were things that weren’t awesome from this past week – for example, Colorado’s offense, but much of that was Georgia’s defense and goaltending. I didn’t think it was bad enough to warrant a whole Not Awesome section. Similarly, Panther City’s attendance was not awesome (in fact, it sucked) but that’s a dead horse I’m kinda getting tired of beating.
Monthly Archives: December 2023
Famous lasts
There is a lot of emphasis placed on “firsts”. At the beginning of every season, every team talks about who scored that team’s first goal of the season, and there are frequently online predictions on who will score a team’s first goal in an upcoming game. That’s frequently something you see on betting sites too. And I talked last week about how great it is to see a player’s first NLL goal. But nobody ever talks about “lasts”.
2024 NLL Week 3
It’s only week three of the season and I’ve already listed Albany under “Awesome” twice, and both Vancouver and Saskatchewan have gone from Not Awesome to Awesome. If you’re a Bandits fan, everything about their game on Saturday was awesome (and most of it was pretty awesome even if you’re not a Bandits fan), Albany, Vancouver, and Saskatchewan looked really good this past weekend, and BREAKING NEWS: Lyle Thompson is a good lacrosse player.
2024 NLL Week 2
Another weekend of exciting games, including all the teams that didn’t play in week one, so every team has played now. The two teams that met in the Championship last season both lost to teams that were a combined 11-25 last season, the Knighthawks and FireWolves continue their hot start, the Desert Dogs grab victory from the jaws of defeat, and the Rock, Swarm, and Seals begin their seasons with wins.
Top 50 lists
We sports fans love our lists. We love to make them and we love to argue about them. Rankings of teams (“power rankings”), top players in various categories, top players overall, and so on. Even a Hall of Fame can be viewed as a list of the best all-time players, coaches, refs, etc. Power rankings has always seemed like an odd one to me, since the league standings is the most accurate ranking of teams that you can get, particularly in the NLL now that there are no divisions. Maybe early in the season a team could be over- or under-performing and so they might be better or worse than their record would indicate, but by about the mid-way point of the season, most teams are exactly what their record indicates.
IL Indoor has done its list of the top 50 players for many years, and I had a vote in a number of those. This year the NLL itself has published its own top 50 list, gathered from votes from the various coaches and GMs around the league. Not to be outdone, the PLL is in the process of releasing their top 50 list as well, apparently voted on by the players themselves, though I have my doubts. More on that later.
Let’s look at the lists from these various sources. Don’t worry, I’m not going through each of the lists in exhaustive detail, nor am I posting my own list. I’m just looking at a few highlights and things they got wrong we disagree on.
2024 NLL Week 1
The 2023-2024 NLL season (I tend to shorten that to just the 2024 season since the majority of it will be played in 2024 and it’s just easier) started this past weekend with some pretty exciting games. The T-Birds dominated the Rush, Panther City got by the new-look Warriors, after a dismal 2023 season the Firewolves open their season with a win against Las Vegas, the Knighthawks came from behind to beat the Roughnecks, and the Wings managed to prevent the Riptide from doing the same. Let’s have a look at what rocked and what didn’t in week one.
The Bye Week: help or hinder?
Back in 2019, I wrote a couple of articles for IL Indoor about doubleheader weekends. The first dealt with how often teams won the first and second games of doubleheaders, while the second looked more into how home floor advantage plays into this. The obvious next step would have been to see how bye weekends affect teams but for some reason, I never went there. Let’s go there now.
NLL Chatter 