What a week! Entirely home team wins except in Philly, four OT games, a few big comebacks, a last-place team almost beating a second-place team, a player tying a legend for a goals record, and another player almost tying another one. Let’s get to it!

Awesome

Comebacks

We had a few big comebacks this past weekend. In two of these games, the winning team started off down 4-0, did not score in the first quarter at all, and tied it up late in the fourth. In both games, neither team reached 10 goals. I wrote about the Rock’s OT victory over the Thunderbirds here, and the other comeback game was the Swarm beating the Rush on Sunday afternoon. Saskatchewan kept the Swarm off the board for the entire first half, but Georgia got back into it in the third quarter. They didn’t take control or anything, but they got themselves back in the game. The first half of the fourth quarter was more of the same – a goal each – but then Georgia really turned on the jets. Two goals within 21 seconds got them within one, and then Lyle Thompson tied it with his hat-trick goal with just over four minutes left. A minute and a half later, Andrew Kew scored his third of the game to give Georgia the lead, and then Kason Tarbell potted an empty netter (which he almost missed) to put the game away.

This is the first time since stats became available in 2005 that a team has won a game while not scoring in the first half.

The other comeback was the second-place Seals coming back against the last-place Desert Dogs. The Seals should have won that game easily, right? You might think that, but while the Desert Dogs only have four wins on the season, they’ve beaten some very good teams. Six of their ten losses have been by two goals or less, so they’ve been right there in the majority of games they’ve played this year. A couple of lucky bounces or post-and-in shots instead of post-and-out shots, and they could be sitting at 6-8 or even 7-7 and right there in the playoff conversations. Anyway, Vegas had a 5-1 lead after one and led this game until well into the third quarter, and then it was back and forth, resulting in a 9-9 tie game at the end of regulation. Tre Leclaire ended it less than a minute into the extra period.

Overtime games

We had four overtime games of the eight this weekend. First, Buffalo and Panther City had a game reminiscent of Buffalo’s matchup with Saskatchewan two weeks ago, though this one wasn’t quite as close as that one was. Each team led by two, but the other team managed to come back and tied it again. Of course we went to OT, where Jonathan Donville scored the game winner in a huge gutsy win for Panther City. Then later that same evening, Albany came back after being down by three to start the fourth to keep Calgary scoreless and score three themselves, but the Roughnecks scored their first goal in almost twenty minutes to get the OT win.

Saturday night featured two more OT games, both discussed in the Comebacks section above – the Rock over the Thunderbirds and the Seals over the Desert Dogs.

Not-Overtime games

We also had a couple of games that weren’t anywhere near overtime. In Philadelphia, we had a battle of two probably-out-of-the-playoffs teams as Vancouver came to town for only the second time ever (and first time since January 2020). Vancouver came out flying, leading 6-1 after the first quarter, and never let their foot off the gas. This was not an overtime game by any means, and while Philadelphia came back from being down by six to down by two at the half, they were down by six again eight minutes later. Keegan Bal became the third player this season to score eight goals in a game, and only the second player (since 2005 – the other is John Grant Jr.) to do it twice in his career.

There have been a couple of different Mammoth teams this year – the one that is really struggling to score goals, and the one that has little trouble scoring goals. The first one we’ve seen a lot this year – they’ve been held to 7 or 8 goals six times. But the other one pops up from time to time. They scored 18 against a very good Riptide team a month ago, and then on Saturday they scored 13 against a Rochester team that had won three straight including two against Albany. They got four from Zed Williams and four from Eli McLaughlin, and Dillon Ward played like we know he can. And McLaughlin’s “Are you not entertained?” poses after at least two of his goals were just awesome.

Jeff Teat

Teat just keeps breaking records. He’s the first player in league history to hit 100 points in every season he’s played in; we know this is true because he’s the only player to have hit 100 points in his rookie season. His career points-per-game average of 7.18 is not only the highest in league history, it’s more than a full point better than second place John Grant, Jr., at 6.08. On Saturday, he almost tied another record, scoring a point on 13 of his team’s 14 goals. The only player to beat that was Garrett Billings, who got 15 points on Toronto’s 15 goals in a game back in 2012.

Not Awesome

Comebacks

As great as the comebacks are for the teams that win them, they’re not so great for the teams that allowed them to happen. That said, in both the Toronto and Georgia cases, I thought the Thunderbirds and Rush played very well, and just got beaten by a team that started off slowly and got better. We’ve seen epic collapses in this league, but I don’t think that’s what happened here.

Playoff scenarios

With 28 games left in the regular season, that makes 268,435,456 possible outcomes of those games. That’s not a typo, there are over 268 million possible scenarios. In none of those scenarios does Toronto or San Diego finish outside of the top eight, which means they have clinched playoff spots. None of the other teams have clinched or been eliminated, which means that there is at least one scenario for each team where they make it and at least one where they don’t. You can play with all of these possibilities at the NLL Stats playoff scenario calculator. The reason this is under Not Awesome is because with so many possibilities still out there, it’s difficult and time consuming to go through them all and decide what needs to happen for a particular team to either clinch or be eliminated.