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.

Awesome

Jake Withers

He tied the single-game loose ball record AND the single-game faceoff wins record. In the same game. Oh, and picked up a hat-trick. He even blocked a shot (with his back) while standing on the edge of the crease, so he had a 100% save percentage. And he made us all misty-eyed in an interview when he said his partner and daughter were his “whole world” and he wanted to be a good role model for his little one.

Halifax Thunderbirds

It did not look like game one of the year for the Thunderbirds. They just dominated in every area of this game. Their offense was firing on all cylinders (now imagine adding Randy Staats to that lineup), their defense didn’t let the Rush get many good looks (though the Rush offense did look like it was game one with lots of missed passes, missed shots, and passes that should have been shots), and Warren Hill was outstanding. Petterson, Benesch, Shanks, Theede, Kirst, Jamieson, Bell, Hossack, Armstrong, Terefenko, and obviously Withers and Hill all played very well. Like Pat Gregoire said on the broadcast, obviously it’s very early but if the Thunderbirds play anywhere near like that consistently, they will be a very tough team to beat.

Withers scoring, but not from Friday night

Rochester comeback

It looked like Calgary was going to have the same kind of night that Halifax had on Friday, just running roughshod over the Knighthawks. Rochester had switched goalies a couple of times and were down five at halftime. But in the third, the Knighthawks offense started gelling  and they had stuck with Riley Hutchcraft who played strong. In the third and fourth, they scored eight straight and kept the Roughnecks off the board for over 30 minutes. Rochester’s lead was as high as three at one point, but Calgary got back within one with 20 seconds left. The Knighthawks hung on to win an exciting game. I believe the technical term for that is a “character win”.

Broadcasts

Usually this early in the season, I’m writing about all the problems with the broadcasts, and trying to give the league the benefit of the doubt that it’ll be better or fixed later in the season. But this time, everything (for me, anyway) was flawless. Of course, having the same provider as last year helps. I watched the two TSN broadcasts on Friday night and they were great. There was one time where the screen went black for 20-30 seconds, then they went to commercials but after the ads, we went right back to the game. That was the only blip of the night.

Saturday night’s games were on TSN+, which was free last year. This year I guess that promotion is gone so I had to sign up and give my credit card number, but that was pretty painless. $8 / month is quite reasonable to watch as many lacrosse games as I do. The audio quality was excellent, and the video quality was mostly very good. The video did drop in quality periodically but not for very long, and I think the feed paused for no more than about five seconds two or three times but that was it.

The two Saturday games were even offset by half an hour so when CAL @ ROC went to halftime, I switched to PHI @ NY and watched the second quarter. When that game went to halftime, I went back to the Rochester game and when it ended, I was able to watch the fourth quarter of the Riptide game. I doubt that was intentional, the times were probably more related to the arena and stuff, but if it was intentional, good on the league for thinking of that.

Not Awesome

Saskatchewan

As I said above, the Rush offense looked a bit disconnected, and obviously allowing 17 goals isn’t ideal for the defense or goaltending either. But they have a lot of new faces so some of that is not unexpected in the first game of the year. It was disappointing to see Frank Scigliano’s Rush debut go badly, and then they brought Laine Hruska in to try and stem the tide and he struggled too. They’re not the Rush we got used to in the 20-teens, but they’re in the process of trying to recover from their last two sub-.500 seasons. They’re not there yet, but they’re not this bad either. They’ll figure it out.

Vancouver

Speaking of making a lot of changes, the Warriors revamped their entire defense and brought in veteran Kevin Crowley to help the offense, so a lot of people were expecting big things. Not necessarily a deep playoff run or anything, but significant improvements over last year. However, we didn’t see much of that in game one. Their defense was good, and looked like it could be very good once they all get used to playing together. The secondary scoring did their job, getting goals from Martel, Klarich, Charalambides, and Loewen plus two from Reid Bowering, but when Bal, Killen, and Crowley combine for no goals and three assists, that’s not going to win you many games.

Las Vegas discipline

I didn’t see any of this game since it was on at the same time as the Vancouver/Panther City game. But looking over the game sheet, the FireWolves took a penalty at 3:11 of the first, and then a few roughing penalties at 15:00 of the fourth. In the 57 minutes in between, Albany got no penalties at all while the Desert Dogs took nine, all minors. This resulted in 18 minutes of Albany power play, which means they spent almost a third of the game on the PP. The FireWolves managed to not capitalize on any of those power plays (there’s a Not Awesome for Albany), and the Dogs actually picked up a shortie so it kind of worked out, but that’s generally not a recipe for success. In a game last season, the Desert Dogs picked up 91 penalty minutes while their opponents picked up four. Las Vegas tied Halifax for the league lead in penalty minutes last season and had the second-most power play goals against, so they may want to clean that up a bit.

John Lintz and @NLLFactOfTheDay

I try to keep @NLLFactOfTheDay positive, and not post overly negative facts very often, but last week I found a fact about John Lintz that was too interesting to pass up. I got a bit of pushback and I’m not sure John was too fond of it either. One of the responses to the tweet pointed out that Lintz had won the NLL Championship with four different teams, and after some research I found that not only was this true but it appears that he’s the only player to have done this.

The reason I couldn’t find this fact originally is because there’s no way to find some of this information – I have a list of players who played in the Championship game, but I don’t know who were the healthy scratches in that game, and I don’t know who was on the practice roster, IR, or PUP lists for that team at the time. Lintz’s page on nllstats.com only lists two championships because (a) he didn’t play in any 2009 Roughnecks games (so he’s not listed as having been on the Roughnecks at all) and (b) he didn’t play in any playoff games in 2016, though he was in 13 regular season games. Because I’m missing that PR, IR, & PUP information, I have to draw a line and say that only players that meet some arbitrary set of criteria will be listed as having won the Championship in any given year. The criteria I chose was that they have to have played at least one playoff game with the Championship-winning team. Otherwise I can’t tell if they were cut or traded before the playoffs.

It does mean, however, that in saying that Lintz is the only player for whom this applies, I might be missing some other player who was on the practice roster of a Championship-winning team. Basically what I’m saying is that I NEED MORE DATA.

And for the record, the only game-worn item I own is a Colorado Mammoth “Lacrosse out Cancer” jersey from 2019. It was John Lintz’s jersey.