A whole lotta games this past weekend, even with the Rush/Wings one postponed. There was also a whole lotta awesome in those games, and the not awesomes are two teams that shouldn’t be as bad as they are.

Awesome

Vinc in the 4th quarter

Vinc allowed 13 goals in Saturday’s game, which isn’t great, but he did face 65 shots. But the Bandits began the fourth quarter down by two and as they mounted their comeback, Vinc kept Knighthawks off the board, only allowing a single goal in the last 18+ minutes of the game. The defending champs are 3-2 now, and aren’t having the beginning to the season that they were hoping for. But when Vinc was making big save after big save after big save at the most critical part of that game, that gave the team confidence that this comeback was possible. That reminded them “hey, we’re the freakin’ Bandits. We can do this.” And they did.

Albany… again

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Albany’s core of young offensive stars was dominant, their defense was strong, and Doug Jamieson was solid in the cage, and Albany beat a strong opponent. This week’s challenger was the Georgia Swarm and while the Swarm got a fourth quarter hat-trick from Lyle Thompson and one from Andrew Kew, they couldn’t get closer than four goals back. Alex Simmons only scored a single goal but picked up four assists and still leads the league in scoring. But Albany got their twelve goals from nine different goal scorers so their offense was nicely balanced (“go ahead and key on Simmons or Walker, we’ll just have someone else score instead”). But those goal scorers included Watkinson, Nishimura, and Piatelli, so their transition game was very strong as well.

I may have to stop putting Albany in the Awesome list every week because it’s becoming routine. Who saw that coming a year ago?

Toronto and Halifax

The game was incredible, but both teams were well deserving of an Awesome as well. The Rock offense was not dominated by any one player; Small had 4 goals but the point distribution was very even: two players had one point, two had two, two had three, two had four, and Challen Rogers had five. The transition didn’t score but I thought they played well with Mazzuca, Burns, and Slade making their presence felt, and the defense was excellent as well, particularly (warning: shocking information coming) Brad Kri and Mitch de Snoo. Nick Rose continued his incredible season with an 83% save percentage and only nine goals against. He’s been over 80% and ten or fewer goals against in every game this year. In fact since the beginning of the 2020 season (three full seasons plus four games this season), Rose has a 9.13 GAA (best in the league among starters over that time – a full point better than Del Bianco or Vinc) and an 80.9% save percentage (best in the league among starters).

For the Thunderbirds, Terefenko was all over the place and had at least three good quality transition chances in the first quarter alone, and capitalized on a couple later on. Warren Hill and the Halifax D were both very good, and Hill was outstanding in the fourth quarter, particularly on the PK. Jake Withers showed why he’s so much more than a faceoff guy. In fact, I’d say he’s made the transition (pun very much intended) from a face-off guy who’s a good defender to a great defender who also happens to be one of the best in the game at face-offs. Benesch, Staats, Jamieson, and Petterson all had strong games for the T-Birds. In the third quarter, Halifax scored three goals to cut the lead but two of them were followed by a Rock goal less than 40 seconds later, so any momentum the Thunderbirds tried to create was immediately wiped out. They scored three straight within a minute and a half in the fourth, which certainly made the rest of the game exciting, but Rose just wouldn’t let them get any closer.

In a nutshell, Halifax played a very good game but just ran into a very hot Nick Rose and Toronto defense.

Non-goalie saves

I was going to include this in the Toronto/Halifax section, but these plays were good enough to warrant their own section. In the last minute of the game, Mitch de Snoo caused a turnover and ran down towards the Halifax empty net, but Clarke Petterson made an amazing stick save, and then ran the entire length of the floor and shot on Rose who made the stop. But the rebound went right to Dawson Theede who shot at the empty net, only to stopped by Challen Rogers who jumped to stop it with his chest. Of course, they won’t be credited with a save or anything but those were a couple of amazing plays by a couple of amazing players.

Nick Damude

I didn’t see a lot of this game as I was switching back and forth between a few different games but it seemed that every time I hit the Panther City game, Nick Damude was making an amazing save. It also seemed that half of those were on either clear breakaways or on a player standing right on the edge of the crease. It’s true that New York’s offense has been struggling this year, except for last week, but regardless of how a team is playing, if you give just about any NLL forward an open look at the goalie, they’re going to score a good percentage of the time. To get that many saves on those types of shots is impressive.

Christian Del Bianco

Yes, Del Bianco played very well in Calgary’s win over Vancouver, and he certainly deserves an Awesome for that, but this is actually for something else. It’s not a big thing but it’s still awesome. Reid Bowering ran across the crease while shooting on Del Bianco early in the second quarter of their game on Saturday. After the shot, Bowering dropped his stick (or it was knocked out of his hands or something) and he ran to the bench without it. After making the save, Del Bianco passed the ball up to a transition player and then picked up Bowering’s stick and tossed it to the ref so he could get it back to the Vancouver bench. I’ve certainly seen cases where a player either ignores an opponent’s dropped stick or sometimes kicks it even further away, so to see Del Bianco show that kind of sportsmanship to get his opponent’s stick back to him was refreshing.

Attendance

The games this past weekend all had pretty decent attendance numbers:

• Rochester – 8167. Highest attendance in team history
• New York – 4928. Best so far this season
• Georgia – 7154. Best so far this season
• Colorado – 9652. Roughly the same as last year’s average
• Vancouver – 8600. Fourth best in team history, even if you include the five years as the Vancouver Stealth* Update: The attendance has been updated to 11,457, which is the highest attendance in franchise history, i.e. the highest attendance in the history of the Warriors, Vancouver Stealth, Washington Stealth, San Jose Stealth, and Albany Attack.
• Halifax – 8921. Seventh best in team history
• Las Vegas – 6203. Fourth best in team history

* Note that the Stealth played in the Langley Events Centre which only holds about 5,200 people, so they couldn’t possibly have beaten this number. But in those five years, they only got over 5,000 once.

Not Awesome

Colorado

Colorado is probably the weirdest team of the last five years. They went to the Championship series in two straight seasons, winning one of them, but finished the regular season 10-8 in one of those years and 9-9 in the other. In both years they played through adversity in the form of injuries, losing Ryan Lee for most of the 2022 playoffs (after an insane 119-point regular season), then while still without Lee for most of the next regular season, they lost Joey Cupido as well but made it to the finals again anyway. This year, they’re without Lee again though Cupido has returned. Dillon Ward started the season on the IR but has also returned though he hasn’t played at his normal level yet. The Mammoth are tied for dead last in the league at 1-4. They’re down Rhys Duch but up Connor Kelly, and they’re down John Lintz but up Paul Dawson, so they’re not a hugely different team from last season (minus Ryan Lee of course), but they’re just not looking good at all.

Vancouver

Vancouver is probably the second-weirdest team of the last five years. I know I’ve said this before but every year for the last few, we look at the changes they made in the off-season and think “this is the year Vancouver might make some serious progress”, but it never happens. This year we thought the same thing, and they looked really good in their win against the Swarm in week 3. Then they lost to a strong Knighthawks team but only by two. Then came the annual collapse against the Mammoth, and then on Saturday they didn’t look against Calgary at all. They kept up with the Roughnecks for the first quarter but then went 26 minutes without scoring while allowing six Calgary goals, and that was basically it. They have two scorers in the top 40, and neither of them is Keegan Bal, who’s 44th. He finished sixth overall two years ago. Kyle Killen hasn’t reached double digits in points after five games.

If you look at the lineup, you might think this is a team that should at least be contending. They have an experienced goalie and an excellent defense. Their offense maybe isn’t in the top echelon of NLL offenses but should be good enough to keep them in any game, especially considering the defense. And they have one of the best coaches in the game.

The Vancouver Ravens were a decent team and had decent attendance but only survived three seasons. The Vancouver Stealth were terrible for the five years they were around, and rebranding as the Warriors was intended to change things, but the Vancouver curse seems to live on.