It was like watching The Usual Suspects or No Way Out for the first time – what an ending! Many of the questions we all had about playoff positioning were answered on Friday and Saturday, but the final playoff decision came down to the very last game of the season. You can’t ask for better drama and excitement than that.

Awesome

Rochester beats the odds

Rochester entered the final weekend making the playoffs in just over 3% of the remaining scenarios. They needed to win both of their games and get help in three other games, and they got it. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the Knighthawks, but remember that in each of those three games, they needed a higher-seeded team to beat a lower-seeded team. San Diego (#2) had to beat Vancouver, Toronto (#1) had to beat Saskatchewan, and Albany (#3) had to beat New York. Upsets are certainly not impossible and especially this season, any of these upsets happening would not have been shocking, but they did need the most likely outcome in each one. But the Knighthawks also had to beat Georgia, who is a higher seed, and then they had to beat the Wings less than two days later.

So kudos to the Knighthawks. Yes, they needed some help and whether that help was likely or unlikely, when it came to crunch time, Connor Fields, Rylan Hartley, and the Knighthawks got it done when they needed to.

Connor Fields vs. Jordan MacIntosh

Ripper

I should have mentioned this in the Week 20 report. Last week, Knighthawks broadcaster Craig Rybczynski called his 400th straight Rochester Knighthawks game. Read that again – four hundred straight games, home and away, without missing a single one. He started this streak in November 2001, so he hasn’t missed a game in over twenty years. That is incredible. There are more than twenty players in the NLL today who had not yet been born when Ripper began his streak. Congratulations to Ripper, who is one of the best in the business.

Sellout in Halifax

10,595 fans showed up in Halifax to watch their Thunderbirds finish off the regular season with a win over the Mammoth. This was after they clinched a playoff spot and after it was announced that they could not host a first-round playoff game, so there was kind of nothing to play for here. If they do manage to host a playoff game, the atmosphere inside the Nest would be unbelievable. Some of the Thunderbirds staff and players have been saying it for a while, and the city has backed them up – Halifax is definitely a lacrosse city.

Crowd in Calgary

Also a lacrosse city, Calgary had over 14,000 people show up to a game which was effectively meaningless since the Roughnecks had already been eliminated. Well, it was meaningless for the Roughnecks, though the outcome did affect Vancouver, New York, and Rochester. But for Calgary to have their biggest attendance of the season after their playoff hopes had been dashed is impressive.

Unified standings

Jake Elliott has said it a few times on the Lacrosse Classified podcast – the unified standings might be the most important change that the league has ever made. They certainly led to an exciting final weekend where the last playoff spot was decided by the very last game. It was certainly possible for that to happen in previous years, and it likely did, but we’ve had plenty of years where the playoff seedings from one division, or sometimes both, are decided a couple of weeks before the end of the season. No team wants to be eliminated with three or four games left to play.

Without the divisions, there are so many more possible outcomes. With the divisions the way they were in 2023, there were about 1.2 million possibilities for four teams in the East and four teams in the West to be chosen, and that includes the crossover (where 5th place team in the East crosses over to the West if they have a better record than the 4th place team in the West). This season, there are over 259 million possible ways to choose 8 teams from 15, which leads to a whole lot of outcomes that wouldn’t have been possible in previous years. For example, Panther City clinched their spot in the playoffs on Friday night but until then, it was still possible for San Diego to be the only team in the former West division to make the playoffs. Obviously, that couldn’t have happened before.

As we suspected at the beginning of the season, the unified standings opened things up and made every game that much more meaningful.

Dhane Smith hits 100 assists

I’m old enough to remember twelve years ago when Garrett Billings set the new record for assists in a season with 82. That was just an amazing number. Then Josh Sanderson and Shawn Evans both hit 83 in 2015, and then Mark Matthews hit 84 in 2018. These were astronomical numbers. Just for the record, Billings got his 82 in 16 games, and the rest were in 18-game seasons. But can you imagine getting more than 84 assists in a season? Maybe someone will have an incredible season and hit the high 80’s or something, but beyond that is Wayne Gretzky territory, i.e. something that the absolute best player might have a chance to do but nobody else possibly could. Well, it’s now Dhane Smith territory.

Smith finished the 2024 season with an unbelievable 101 assists. In 2022, Smith beat Matthews’s record by ten. Then he beat that in 2023. Then he beat that in 2024. He is the only player in league history to record 90 assists in a season, and he’s done it three times. It’s not just amazing that he’s passed the 100 milestone, but it’s even more amazing that he’s racked up 16 more assists in one season than anyone else ever has – the next closest is Ryan Lee with 85 in 2022.

Broadcaster homerism

A lot of NLL broadcasters used to be quite biased for the team that they worked for. If their team scored, it was a big deal, if the other team scored, not so much. Penalties against their team were often questionable, while penalties against the other team were well-deserved. You would frequently hear “<defender> knocks <home team star player> down, no call, …” implying that there could or should have been a call, even if the check was perfectly legal.

I don’t expect absolutely unbiased announcers. Honestly, if they yell a bit louder for home team goals than their opponent’s goals, that’s fine. But I do expect honesty and integrity. If your team takes a blatant penalty, don’t talk about how unfair it is. If the other team makes an amazing play, tell us it was amazing. If your team is playing badly, you need to say that rather than talking about how lucky the opponent has been. We get enough homer comments on Facebook, we don’t need them coming from the broadcast booth.

With all of that background said, I think this has changed a lot since then, and the vast majority of NLL announcers do a great job here. I’m only saying “majority” here because I can’t say for certain that ALL of them do a great job in this regard, but I also cannot think of any that don’t.

I thought about adding this entry when listening to Craig Rybczynski (see above) talking about some incredible saves made by Zach Higgins in the final game of the season. He could easily have said “Fields takes the shot, save by Higgins…” and moved on, but he made a point of saying “What an amazing save by Higgins”. Then I realized that I hear this a lot on NLL broadcasts. Sometimes the broadcast crew is not specific to the team and is brought in by the league or by TSN, so they have no “home” bias. But even if that’s not the case, a lot of the time it’s not obvious which team the crew works for and in my opinion, that’s ideal.

The “Awesome” here is that broadcaster homerism is not a big problem in the NLL anymore.

Not Awesome

Penalties wiped out by goals

If a player commits a penalty while his team does not have possession, play continues anyway. This is called a “delayed penalty”. A ref will raise his arm to signal a delayed penalty, and the team getting the power play will sometimes pull their goalie to get a brief 6-on-5 before the power play even begins. Once a possession change happens, the whistle is blown and the penalized player heads to the penalty box. But if a goal is scored against his team during the delayed penalty, i.e. before he’s gone to the box, the penalty is wiped out entirely, as if it never happened. In my humble opinion, this is wrong. The player committed the penalty and that should be reflected in his stats. There wouldn’t be a power play, so nothing in the actual game changes, but the penalty should still be assessed against the player.

If a player goes to the penalty box and a goal is scored against his team five seconds later, he is released from the penalty box but the two-minute penalty remains as part of his stats. This is the same concept but in this case, the penalty time has not yet begun. I’m not sure how the ref would describe this – the penalty isn’t “cancelled”, though the power play is. Maybe “suspended”, though that implies that it might be “resumed” again later which is also wrong. Maybe we don’t change the penalty description, we just explicitly say that the power play is cancelled:

“Joe Laxalot, two minutes for slashing, the power play is cancelled because of the goal”

If you look at the scoresheet later, you’d see a two minute penalty for slashing assessed against Mr. Laxalot, but no power play. Like I said, no part of the game play changes, just the scoresheet.

Hey Brian Lemon, EVP of Lacrosse Operations of the NLL: the 2025 NLL season won’t begin for seven or eight months, so there’s plenty of time to implement this change.