We still have two teams tied atop the standings, as the Rock and FireWolves both won this past weekend. Oddly, we have two teams tied at .500: New York, with a goal differential of -10 and Panther City, with a goal differential of +9. Lots to talk about this week, and I didn’t even mention half of the games. I didn’t see any of the Wings/Desert Dogs, Bandits/Thunderbirds, or Mammoth/FireWolves games. But the UnBoxed series began this week, and we even have some rare mid-season non-NLL news: the PLL Championship Series concluded on Monday.

Awesome

NLL UnBoxed game in Montreal

The first NLL game in Quebec since 2002 was played on Friday as the Riptide (sort of) hosted the Rock. The game itself was exciting, as the Riptide took an early lead and led by three on four different occasions, but the Rock chipped away and tied it by halftime. Then Nick Rose and the Rock D really found their groove and kept the Riptide off the board for almost 25 minutes. By the time Stephen Keogh broke the drought by scoring his first of a couple of shorthanded goals in the fourth, the Rock had scored seven straight and had a five-goal lead that they never gave up. The Rock were deadly on the power play, with 6 man-up goals, and Mark Matthews (4+7) and Tom Schreiber (1+8) combined for twenty points.

The game was played at Place Bell in Laval, a suburb of Montreal. The arena is only seven years old, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that they had impressive camera angles for the game as well as replays, and the whole presentation looked and sounded great. Broadcasters Jon Abbott, Pat Gregoire, and Ashley Docking were excellent as usual, and I believe the game was broadcast in French on RDS (the French language version of TSN) as well, though I haven’t heard anything about how that went or who the announcers were. The fans were loud and engaged, and when they announced the attendance of 6,437, I was surprised that it was that low given the noise level and shots of the crowd, which seemed to show a pretty full arena. See the Not Awesome section for some more on that.

The refs even announced the penalties in both French and English. One of the refs was clearly more hesitant and said as little as possible while the other was obviously fluent. If there were details that needed to be relayed to the crowd (for example “the coach’s challenge is denied because the flag was not thrown quickly enough”), it was the second ref who did it. There was a checking from behind penalty, and the announcement sounded to me like “deux minutes, check derrière”, which may or may not have been correct but was awesome anyway.

All in all, this was a very successful event for everyone concerned, though I guess slightly less so for the Riptide because they lost the game.

Calgary

After a less than impressive 2-5 start to the season, the Roughnecks seem to have found themselves again. They posted an impressive win over Toronto last weekend and then kept that momentum going by beating Halifax this week. Christian Del Bianco started to look more like the MVP from last season, particularly with the incredible outlet passes he routinely makes, frequently from his own goal crease to beyond the far restraining line. The Roughnecks D kept the Thunderbirds forwards frustrated most of the night, and nine different Roughnecks (including Del Bianco) scored 3+ points. They even managed to keep Jake Withers to 61.3% at the faceoff dot, which is damned impressive.

The Calgary transition continues to be one of the best in the league, with Simpson, Currier, Hoggarth, Hudson, and Cornwall all able to play solid D but get up the floor in a hurry. I said recently that Del Bianco and Simpson are the new Ward and Cupido, and then this week I confirmed that.

Hidden ball trick

It doesn’t work often, but every now and again the ol’ hidden ball trick shows up and makes everyone on the defensive side feel silly. Halifax pulled it off to perfection on Sunday, as Ryan Terefenko pretended to toss the ball to Clarke Petterson, who skillfully cradled the nothing in his stick as he ran to the far side. Terefenko looked like he was jogging to the bench, then turned and fired a laser from just inside the restraining line. Nobody on the Roughnecks even reacted for a second or two, implying that none of them had any idea who had the ball. Have to admit, they had me too.

PLL Championship Series

I didn’t watch any of the Championship Series, but Monday was Family Day here in Ontario. Since I wasn’t working, I was able to watch the Championship Game and I have to say it was a really exciting game. It’s sixes format, so a much smaller field, only six players a side, 30 second shot clock, no long poles, and a few other changes that make it look more similar to box lacrosse. There are also no face-offs other than starting a quarter, so the game play was virtually non-stop. There were tons of goals and yet the whole game took under an hour and a half. Is it the same as typical field lacrosse you’d see in the PLL or NCAA? No, definitely not, but as long as you’re not being an annoying purist (“this isn’t real lacrosse”), it can be entertaining.

And this game was. There was lots of offense, some two-point goals, even some chippiness that you don’t always see in the field game. Because they don’t have a “stance” like box lacrosse or hockey goalies do, field lacrosse goalies always look to me like some guy off the street who knew nothing about lacrosse was given a goalie stick and told to stand in the net, and told nothing else about what to do. And then they face shots and spin the stick around at a million miles an hour and make saves they have no business making. In sixes, it’s worse because there’s less in the way of defense, so players get wide open looks or 1-on-1’s a lot more often, and so we see these crazy-high scores. But in this case, Matt DeLuca and Colin Kirst played out of their minds. We still had almost fifty goals in this game, but late in the fourth quarter and in overtime, there were several saves by both goalies (including two by DeLuca in about five seconds) that literally saved the game for their teams. As I always do in these kinds of situations, I felt bad for both goalies, knowing that regardless of how well they play, one of them will lose.

I criticized the PLL Championship Series last year because it wasn’t every team playing, the teams that did play didn’t field their full team (because many of them play in the NLL), and it wasn’t the normal PLL rules, so what’s the real point? Does it really mean anything? But after watching the game and how hard the players played, as well as the celebration afterwards, it’s clearly very meaningful to all of the players. I mean, watch this interview with Kieran McArdle, who won the Golden Stick award for having the most points in the Series but lost the Championship. He couldn’t care less about the award he won because he was so focused on winning the award he didn’t. Then watch this one with Cannons head coach Brian Holman talking about winning with his son Marcus. Now tell me the Series didn’t mean anything to these guys.

Will it affect the next PLL regular season this summer? Maybe, maybe not. But even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t follow that the Series was meaningless.

Congrats to the Boston Cannons and the PLL on an excellent Championship Series and a very exciting Championship game.

Not Awesome

NLL UnBoxed game in Montreal

Like I said, the game was great, the presentation was great, the fans were great, and Montreal made a strong case for having an NLL team return to La Belle Province. What wasn’t awesome about it was how it indirectly highlighted the lack of attendance at other NLL arenas. I joked on Twitter during the game that there were more people at this game than at all Panther City games this year combined. This was an exaggeration, to be sure, but it wasn’t as much of one as you might think.

For a neutral-site game, they had a good-sized crowd of 6,437. That’s lower than any home game the Express had in 2002 (which ranged from 6,590 to 9,339), but then you’d expect more from a team based in that city. Panther City’s total attendance in their three home games so far is 8,293, so yes, their three games have outdrawn the Laval game by about 1,800. But this neutral-site game had higher attendance than the home attendance of any single game in Rochester, San Diego, New York, Albany, or Panther City this year, with the exception of one Buffalo @ Rochester game which featured a zillion Bandits fans who made the drive down I-90.

Just to be clear: this Riptide home game played 400 miles away from Nassau Coliseum got more fans than any Riptide home game at Nassau Coliseum in the four-year history of the franchise. That’s rather sad.

Haven’t you people ever heard of closing a goddamn door

In the Rock vs Riptide game on Friday, Brad Kri and John LaFontaine fought right in front of the Riptide bench near the end of the second quarter. LaFontaine pushed Kri towards the boards but instead of stopping there, Kri fell backwards through the open bench door into the Riptide bench and LaFontaine fell on top of him. That basically ended the fight and the two players went to their respective sin bins. But why the hell was the door open?

When there’s a fight (or any kind of play at all, really) happening right there in front of the bench, close the damn door. That fall could have resulted in serious injury and there was no reason for the door to be open. It’s not like a player was going to push past the two fighting guys in order to get to the bench. Maybe there should be a bench minor for that – if a team doesn’t close and latch the door and it affects the play in any way, the team gets a bench minor. Not sure what the penalty would be though, it’s not really Unsportsmanlike Conduct, Delay of Game, Illegal Substitution… so maybe a new penalty needs to be created. I’d love to hear Todd Labranche call “New York penalty, bench minor for not closing the damn door.”