The parity in the NLL gave us a bunch of exciting games this weekend and few games you might call upsets. But if you bet on lacrosse, you might be more inclined to phrase it as “parity reared its ugly head this weekend”. The old cliche of “any team can beat any other team on any given night” continues to hold true. In addition to some great games, we had a few milestones reached, and in the Not Awesome category, I make a suggestion that the NLL should implement, and it would likely only require them to upgrade many or all of the NLL arenas and cost them an insane amount of money!

Awesome

Riptide

They’ve won three straight, against strong teams like Buffalo, Georgia, and Calgary, and are currently sitting in a playoff position. They are playing with confidence and maybe even a bit of well-earned swagger. Dunkerley is playing like he’s been an NLL starter for ten years. Jeff Teat is playing like Jeff Teat, and there are very few bigger compliments these days. Matisz, Sundown, Kearnan, Keogh are playing very well. Callum Jones is one of the top rookie D guys in the league. They just got their captain back from injury. Guys like Matt Marinier, Ron John, and Brett Noseworthy are having great seasons. The seafoam jerseys. And the art design team is continually hittin’ ’em out of the park. What’s not to love about the Riptide?

Thunderbirds transition

Two plays a minute apart in the second quarter:

• Scott Dominey gets a breakaway, Warren Hill makes a great stop, Hossack picks it up and passes to Shanks who passes to Theede who does a nice 360° spin before diving across the crease and scoring over Higgins’ left shoulder.
• Mitch Jones takes a shot, saved by Warren Hill, Hossack picks that one up too and gets it to Bell who runs up the floor, passes backwards to Colton Armstrong and then sets a strong pick on Dominey, allowing Armstrong to run around the both of them and score five-hole.

Neither featured jaw-dropping “never seen anything like it” moves, but both were beautiful plays featuring great goaltending and transition that resulted in goals.

Warren Hill

Desert Dogs

After getting their doors blown off last week, where almost nothing was going right, the Dogs had an incredible bounceback game and beat the first place team. On the road. Across the country. Landon Kells allowed two Albany goals in the first two minutes, and it briefly looked like we might be in for more of the same as last week. But Kells and the Desert Dogs immediately settled down after that and only allowed four more the rest of the game. Albany had their issues offensively and the Las Vegas defense kept them off-balance a lot.

The Desert Dogs are still the lowest-scoring team in the league, averaging only 9.7 goals per game. But their three wins have come while keeping their opponents to 10 or fewer goals, and that includes Panther City (the team that blew their doors off) as well as San Diego and Albany. Vegas definitely needs to score more goals but we’ve seen what their defense can do. If the back-end can be a little more consistent, they don’t need to score 15 a game to win.

Milestones

Congratulations to the great Dhane, Rosey, and Dobes (I call them these things like they’re close friends of mine – never met any of them) on these milestones reached this weekend:

• Dhane Smith became the 14th player in NLL history to hit 1000 career points. Considering Smith is only 31, he’s got a decent chance of getting to John Tavares’s record of 1749 points before his career is over. The only active players ahead of him are Dane Dobbie (see below), who’s 37, and Callum Crawford and Ryan Benesch, both 39. But if he doesn’t get there, Smith has given us some insight as to why.
• Nick Rose became the 5th goalie (Watson, O’Toole, Vinc, and Poulin are the others) to reach the 100 win plateau. I was kind of surprised that guys like Eliuk (69) and Dietrich (60) never reached 100 wins, but they played in a lot of 8-game or 10-game seasons, so 100 wins would take a long time. Vinc is way out in front (152 wins and counting), but O’Toole is second with 107, so with a very strong second half of the season, Rose could get to second place in 2024.
• Dane Dobbie became the 11th player to hit 1100 career points. Another 53 and he will replace Shawn Williams in the top ten, and then he’ll need another 13 to pass Gary Gait for 9th. After that though, he’ll need 75 to get to where Callum Crawford is now, and of course that number will keep increasing.

Quickies

• Zach Higgins was excellent in the fourth quarter of Philly’s game against Halifax. Yes, they ended up losing in OT, but without Higgins playing as he did, they would have lost by a lot more than one, and wouldn’t have gotten near overtime.
• If I had a nickel for every “Del Bianco makes the stop, passes it up the floor to Shane Simpson” call during Calgary’s game against the Rock, well, I’d have a lot of nickels. Not all of them led to goals (though two of them in the fourth quarter did), but they all led to decent chances. Del Bianco and Simpson are the new Ward and Cupido, or the new Watson and Toll for all you old-school Rock fans.
• I mentioned the Desert Dogs above but Justin Geddie had an excellent game for the FireWolves, albeit in a losing cause. No, the Desert Dogs aren’t an offensive powerhouse but keeping any NLL team below ten goals is pretty awesome. Of course losing such a game is not, but that’s hardly Geddie’s fault.
• I love the fact that lacrosse twitter and now NLL broadcasters are using the term “Schreiberian” to describe amazing offensive plays, usually pinpoint passes. It’s a very accurate term.
• A sock-trick from Austin Staats, ten points including three goals from Curtis Dickson, 4+3 from Dane Dobbie, 2+5 from Wes Berg… it took a little while but this is the offensive strength we were all expecting from the Seals all season. The Seals defense has been good all season, and with Origlieri having an excellent season, the Seals have themselves a 4-game winning streak and have jumped Albany into second place.

Not Awesome

“The shot clock is off…”

When there is a shot clock reset with under 30 seconds left in a quarter, they turn the shot clock off (or set it to 30 but it doesn’t run). WHY? Why don’t they synchronize it with the game clock so the shot clock shows how much time is left in the quarter? The players can’t easily see the game clock, but the shot clock is right behind the net, and the players are used to looking there.

I tweeted this on Saturday night and got a response from former Knighthawks beat writer and current college sports information director Travis Larner. Travis has spent a lot of time using scoreboards, and he told me that the timer and shot clock equipment used (at least in Buffalo) does not have the capability of synchronizing the two clocks. However it appears that there is equipment made by the same company that does have that capability, so it’s likely a matter of upgrading the equipment in the arenas.

Of course, there are 15 arenas and it’s possible that all 15 of them need to be upgraded for this idea to work. There would obviously be a cost associated with this, though I have no idea if we’re talking ten thousand dollars or five million (per arena). In addition, not all NLL teams own the arenas they play in so they would have to get permission from the arena owners (and likely agreement from the other tenants of the building) to do this. Even if the NLL agreed that this is a brilliant idea (and why wouldn’t they?), the cost and logistics make this unlikely.

Untimely penalties

With about a minute left in the fourth quarter of a tied HFX @ PHI game, Ryan Wagner takes a checking from behind penalty, putting Halifax on the power play for the rest of regulation. Philly managed to kill that minute and get to overtime, but the Thunderbirds scored on the PP just 21 seconds in. However the penalty probably prevented a goal that would have given Halifax the lead with a minute left. It didn’t work out, but taking the penalty was probably the right call – or at least it wasn’t a bad call.

On the other hand, in Calgary on Friday, Ethan Ticehurst took a goalie interference call after as he ran through the crease, put the ball in the net (with both feet clearly in the crease) and then crashed into Dunkerley. The goal was obviously waved off but Ticehurst went to the penalty box. There was 8 minutes left in the game, his team was down by one, and New York was 4 for 4 on the PP at that point. A very badly timed and unnecessary penalty. Sometimes, like Wagner’s, taking a penalty is necessary but not in this case. Luckily Calgary managed to kill the penalty but the penalty was still not awesome.

So we have Wagner taking a penalty that was probably warranted but led to his team losing the game, so he was punished for doing the right thing. And we have Ticehurst taking a unnecessary penalty that had no real consequences, so he was not punished (other than spending two minutes in the penalty box) for doing the wrong thing. Sometimes life ain’t fair.