Only three weeks to go before playoffs begin! Of course, the three weeks have 9, 6, and 8 games, so there’s still a lotta lacrosse left, and tons of playoff scenarios. Unless you’re a Las Vegas fan, your team still has a shot of making the playoffs, and if you’re a Toronto, Albany, or San Diego fan, your team is already in! There were only four games last week but a few awesome things happened, so let’s have a look.

Awesome

Dhane and Josh

Simply put, Dhane Smith and Josh Byrne are one of the most potent scoring duos in league history. In fact, as of now, they are arguably tops on that list. I did some quick comparisons with some of the other great duos in history, and the (regular season) results are below (these are in no particular order, and bold means the best). I asked on Twitter for examples of such duos and I probably still missed some that should have been there. Interestingly, most of the pairs below got at least one mention but the first two that I thought of myself did not: Doyle/Manning and Duch/Ratcliff. Sanderson/Manning also got no votes but Doyle/Sanderson did.

For clarity, this is a count of the number of games in which both players played, and the average number of goals, assists, and points from both players.

Players	Games	Goals/game	Assists/game	Points/game
Dhane Smith & Josh Byrne	81	4.17	7.89	12.06
Colin Doyle & Blaine Manning	84*	3.68	6.40	10.08
Colin Doyle & Josh Sanderson	81*	3.74	6.58	10.32
Josh Sanderson & Blaine Manning	80*	3.40	6.19	9.59
Rhys Duch & Lewis Ratcliff	82	4.60	5.76	10.35
Rhys Duch & Corey Small	68	4.04	6.09	10.13
John Grant, Jr. & Shawn Williams	77*	4.96	6.38	11.34
Mark Matthews & Robert Church	151	4.01	6.48	10.49
John Tavares & Mark Steenhuis	156*	4.11	5.20	9.31
Dane Dobbie & Curtis Dickson	171	4.87	4.94	9.80
Lyle Thompson & Randy Staats	76	4.24	6.13	10.37
Ryan Benesch & Callum Crawford	69	3.91	6.38	10.35

* – Indicates that this duo played together prior to 2005. Game stats aren’t available for those seasons so these numbers only indicates games played from 2005 on.

Smith & Byrne have the fifth-best goals per game average, the best assists per game, and the best points per game among those pairs. They’re ahead in assists than everyone else by more than one full assist per game, and only Junior and Willy are within 1.5 points per game.

The Dhane and Josh show – note that this is not
a nickname for the Bandits offense, but
it’s not far off

Dhane and Josh are good friends off the floor, and that certainly helps their chemistry on the floor. Either one can score in any manner imaginable, but I think of Dhane as having more of a deceptive shot – you don’t know when, where, or even if he’s going to shoot. Josh goes right to the net a little more and is so dynamic – he and Callum Crawford have the highest level of “how is he going to score next” of any player in the league. And of course, they are both great passers as well so just as you think you might have them both covered, one of them will pass to Nanticoke or Cloutier or Buchanan who’s wide open and you’re done.

Any team would give up a lot to get either one of them on their team, but Bandits fans get the honour of having them both. Bandits fan or not, these two are just a treat to watch.

Ryan Benesch

This is Benesch’s seventeenth season in the NLL, and he shows no sign of slowing down. He scored twice on Saturday to pass Dan Dawson for fourth on the all-time scoring list with 552 goals. The only players who have more are Gary Gait (635), John Grant, Jr. (668), and John Tavares (815). Not bad company. He’s also in the top ten in assists and points, and he just passed Shawn Evans for 6th with 271 games played.

But it’s not that he’s putting up OK numbers this year that add to his already huge totals. He passed the 40 goal plateau this past weekend for the first time since he led the league with 55 in 2015, and his 4.63 points/game average is his best since 2018. He’s made no secret that he wants to win a Championship in Halifax; if it doesn’t happen, it won’t be because Beni didn’t do enough.

Vancouver

Overall, Vancouver isn’t having a great season, and will likely miss the playoffs, though that’s not guaranteed at this point. They’ve won four of their last five, though three of those wins came against the last-place Desert Dogs and the second-last-place Wings. But it’s not that they’re beating up on bad teams, they’ve just been playing really well lately. They lost to the first-place Rock, but kept them to just nine goals, and played a really solid game. Then they beat the Bandits, which few expected them to. Aden Walsh has grabbed the starting goaltender reins and hasn’t let them go, giving the Warriors a solid starter that they can have confidence in, something Vancouver hasn’t had in, roughly, a million years. Bal and Charalambides are having great seasons. Crowley, just like the rest of his career, isn’t putting up massive numbers but if you watch him on the floor, he’s a big part of the reason why others are. Bowering missed three games but is still leading the team in loose balls. Their defense took a few games to get to know each other but has been excellent of late. Even the attendance has been great in Vancouver.

It seems clear that hiring Curt Malawsky was the right move and now that everyone has bought into his systems, they are already starting to see positive results. It might be too late for this season, but I haven’t heard Vancouver people this excited and optimistic about their lacrosse team in… well, maybe EVER.

Tehoka Nanticoke

Nanticoke isn’t the top scorer on the Bandits (see Smith & Byrne above) but he’s an excellent source of secondary scoring and a great example of a player willing to do whatever it takes to help his team, whether that’s scoring the goals himself (and he can score some beautiful goals) or grabbing loose balls and getting the hell beaten out of him in the middle in an attempt to make some space for the other scorers. He had one goal and no assists but I noticed him a lot in Saturday’s game against Philadelphia, as he worked his tail off to get rebounds and loose balls. I was surprised that he only ended up with 4 loose balls in the game, as it seemed that he picked up a ton of them.

Not Awesome

Philadelphia

A top five of Mitch Jones, Ben McIntosh, Blaze Riorden, Joe Resetarits, and Holden Cattoni should give you better-than-decent scoring, but they’re 10th overall in goals. Cattoni has missed five games and Riorden has missed a couple as well, so that’s not helping. Then again, Toronto have missed Tom Schreiber for 5 games and Challen Rogers for 6 and they’re in first place.

Zach Higgins is having a pretty decent season; the numbers don’t really support that but every time I watch a Wings game, it seems the end result is “Higgins played well, but the Wings lost anyway”. Indeed, they are dead last in goals allowed. Maybe Higgins isn’t playing that well overall and I’m just remembering the great saves and forgetting the “ones he wants back”. But if he’s playing well and the team is still giving up 13+ goals per game, that points at the defense as the problem. But more than likely, there’s no one problem that they can solve and be a contending team in 2025, it’s a combination of a bunch of things.

They have not technically been eliminated from the playoffs but of the teams that remain, the Wings have the lowest possibility of making the playoffs. There are 16,777,216 possible outcomes of the 24 remaining games. The Wings only make the playoffs in 49,964 of them, or 0.3%. If they miss, that just gives Paul Day a few more weeks to figure out how to improve his team for next year.