We had a few upsets in the NLL this week, resulting in wins for three different teams who only had one win on the season. We are also down to just one undefeated team. This week’s report is a bit of a long one, so grab yourself a cup of coffee or something.

Awesome

Loud fans

Shortly after the Swarm / Rock game started, the kid sitting behind me and one seat to the right started banging his thundersticks together, while the guy behind me and one seat to the left started yelling at the Rock, the Swarm, and the refs. My first thought was “This is going to be a long game.” The kid must have broken the thundersticks or just put them away, since I didn’t hear (or notice) them for the rest of the game, but the guy never stopped yelling. Sometimes he was coaching, from simple stuff like “Let’s go boys” to more complex stuff like “If he gets into the middle, take him out!”, and later in the game, “DO NOT let him get inside” when Lyle Thompson had the ball. Clearly he knew what he was talking about because that’s good advice. But he was also yelling at the refs whenever the Rock took a penalty, trying to explain why they were mistaken. He did the tired old “I’m blind, I’m deaf, I wanna be a ref!” chant. He was absolutely flabbergasted when Dan Lintner got a holding penalty – he couldn’t believe how they could make such an egregious call, yelling “NO WAY REF! NO WAY!” Then we saw a replay showing Lintner clearly holding the Swarm player. He stopped yelling then, but it didn’t stop him on the next Rock penalty. There were plays that we were in no position to see at all, and yet he had strong opinions that it didn’t happen the way the ref, standing ten feet away, saw it. He booed Swarm players who did nothing other than score. I hate that.

It was kind of irritating and I was considering writing this up in the Not Awesome section. But then I realized that there were some people in the row in front of me who arrived late, left two or three times during play to get drinks or visit people or whatever, and then left midway through the fourth quarter. Clearly the game itself was secondary to their social outing – and that’s fine. I realize that not everyone is as interested in the game as I am. But the guy behind me was. Yes, he was loud and a bit of a homer, but he was excited and interested and engaged. That’s awesome.

Lyle Thompson

Lyle was everywhere in this game. Three goals, three assists, six loose balls, a caused turnover, some great defensive work, one case where he chased down and caught up to someone with a breakaway and prevented a shot, a couple of pass interceptions, and at least once he just shoved his stick in a passing lane and knocked a pass down. There are some aspects of lacrosse where Lyle Thompson is one of the best in the game. For just about every other aspect, he’s just very very good. Clearly he’s got a ton of talent but he also works as hard as anyone and looks like he’s having fun doing it.

I’ve heard a number of interviews with Lyle as well and he’s very well-spoken and has an unmatched respect and reverence for the game itself. The indigenous community, actually the lacrosse community in general, couldn’t ask for a better spokesperson.

Toronto stays undefeated

With Nick Rose facing Brett Dobson, we knew this would be a low-scoring affair, and first quarter was certainly consistent with that. One goal each about nine minutes in, and nothing else. In the second, Georgia started to pull away a bit, scoring four and taking a 5-3 lead into halftime. Both goalies were excellent, with each one making “OMG-how-did-he-stop-that” saves. In the first half, the Rock offense was not quite in sync. They only had a single goal that wasn’t on a breakaway. Mark Matthews in particular looked like he wasn’t seeing the ball very well, with some shots that missed the net by a couple of feet and a couple of passes to nobody. But in the second half, both offenses came alive a little bit more (8 goals in the first half, 13 in the second). Matthews looked closer to his usual form (though he only had three points) and both Rose and Dobson both allowed a few more goals but still played strong. The Rock came back from being down 7-4 and tied it at 7. The game was tied at 8 and 9 as well before the Rock scored the last three goals of the game and kept Georgia scoreless for the last ten minutes or so. TD Ierlan got injured last week, so faceoffs were handled by committee (mostly Billy Hostrawser and Zack Kearney; oddly Brad Kri, the Rock’s faceoff guy before Ierlan, didn’t take any). The Rock lost the face-off battle 18-10.

With the news that Albany had already lost, the Hamilton crowd was excited to learn that the Rock was now the only undefeated team left in the NLL. Of course we don’t expect that to last for the whole season (see the next entry) but if this team can get to 5-0, what will they be like with the return of Chris Corbeil, TD Ierlan, and Tom Schreiber?

San Diego and Albany goaltending

We all knew it was inevitable that Albany’s winning streak would come to an end. Not because the team is overrated or on the decline, just because any NLL team going 18-0, no matter how good a team they are, is really unlikely. But who would be the team to hand the FireWolves their first loss? It turned out to be the San Diego Seals.

The San Diego D started out strong, only allowing a single Albany goal in the first 29:58 of the game (Alex Simmons scored a power play goal with less than two seconds left in the first half). The defense kept the Albany offense to the outside and in the rare occasion that they got inside or had a clear shot, Origlieri had their back. The Albany defense was strong too, and I didn’t think San Diego’s offense was actually firing on all cylinders either (at least in the first half), but they managed to get more behind Jamieson than Albany did behind Origlieri. Jamieson only played the first half before an injury prevented him from continuing, but Justin Geddie was strong in relief. Geddie had an outstanding third quarter, allowing a single goal a few seconds before the end of the quarter, and had a couple of excellent outlet passes as well, at least one of which led to an Albany goal. There was a power play midway through the fourth where the Seals had something like four shots in about 15 seconds, and Geddie stopped three of them before Dobbie was able to get one past him. Geddie fell back to earth a bit in the second half of the fourth – not playing badly by any means but you can only hold off that powerful Seals offense for so long.

Congrats to Origlieri and the Seals on a strong victory, to Justin Geddie on an excellent performance while coming in cold, and also to the FireWolves for their incredible start to the season.

Colorado and Vancouver

Just a week after both of these teams were listed in my Not Awesome section, they both won. Vancouver, having seen it done to them a few times, mounted an impressive come-from-behind victory over the Saskatchewan Rush, while the Mammoth got scoring from all over the place in their win against Calgary. The Warriors were down by four to start the fourth quarter, but scored six unanswered goals and kept the Rush off the board for almost 20 minutes. Aaron Bold and the Vancouver D performed just like Warrior fans were hoping they would at the beginning of the season. There are a lot of new faces there so it sometimes takes a while to get everyone on the same page and knowing each others styles and strengths and such. (Other times, like in Albany, they seem to gel right away.) The offense has been struggling so far this season as well but when your defense is strong, you don’t need to score 15 goals to win.

Dillon Ward is not having a great season. Since he missed Colorado’s first game of the season with an injury, and then either lost or got pulled in each of the next four, one wonders if that injury is completely healed. But Ward was solid in net on Saturday, or at least slightly better than Christian Del Bianco, which was all the Mammoth needed. The offense had a good night, with McLaughlin, Robinson, Wardle, and Connor Kelly each having 4+ points, and they got lots of offensive help from their transition and defenders as well, with Gilles, Edwards, Craig, and Cupido each scoring. This team isn’t vastly different (personnel-wise) from the one that went to the last two Championships, but they’ve got some work to do to get back there.

Not Awesome

The Rush

The Saskatchewan Rush are now dead last in the NLL standings, somewhere you don’t expect to see the Rush. Even in the last two seasons when they missed the playoffs, they were never that bad, just not that good. But it’s not like the Rush have been terrible this season either. They weren’t great in their first game of the season in Halifax, but they haven’t lost by more than 2 in any other game, and they wiped the floor with the Desert Dogs in Las Vegas, only allowing five goals and scoring 17. There were some big changes in the roster this year: they lost Rubisch, Dilks, Matthews, Dinsdale, Beers, and Lintner, and added Scigliano, Dodds, Manns, Triolo, and Wengreniuk. Like I said above, sometimes it takes a while to get everyone to gel and I think particularly on the defensive end, that’s just taking some more time than they were hoping. I’m not sure they’re a playoff team this season (and like the Mammoth, they’ve got some work to do if they want to be), but I don’t see them in last place when the season ends.

No on-screen clock in Albany

I watched the San Diego / Albany game replay on Sunday morning, and for the early part of the game, the scorebug in the top corner just showed the score and what quarter it was. No time, no shot clock, no indicator of a team on the power play, nothing else. With about seven minutes left in the second quarter, the full thing showed up, but the minimal one was there for much of the first half. So it’s not that they didn’t have the technology to do it, which would be unacceptable, but there was some technical glitch preventing it from working. So not awesome, but not really a big deal.