How can we already be talking about Week 5 in the past tense? The season just started, didn’t it? We still have two undefeated teams and two winless teams. In addition, all the games for the 2024 calendar year are now done which means that my talking about the 2025 NLL season as being in progress will sound less like time-travelling. The league does refer to it as the 2024–2025 season, just like the last one was the 2023–2024 season, but I just use the higher number because it’s shorter and a greater percentage of the season will happen in 2025.
Awesome
Maki Jenner
This past weekend, Maki Jenner became the first woman to do colour analysis on an NLL broadcast. She is already the first woman to do colour on a WLA broadcast last year, and she also did colour during the World Lacrosse Box Championships back in September. She is great at what she does, she knows the game very well, and her passion for lacrosse is obvious when she talks about it.
There are girls and young women out there who aspire to be broadcasters, and watching this broadcast will make them realize that being a lacrosse broadcaster at the pro level is now a possibility for them. Hearing a woman doing colour or play-by-play on an NLL broadcast should not be a big deal, and at some point it won’t be. But for now it is, so congrats to Maki on being a groundbreaker yet again.
Maki Jenner talking to Dane Dobbie
Update: @GregOnSports reports that Daniella Ponticelli did colour for a Rush radio broadcast in 2019. If that’s true, then Maki is the first woman to do colour on a video broadcast. Still groundbreaking.
Battle of Ontario
We’ve seen two different Rock teams this season. There was the team that played the first two games, where the offense just couldn’t get organized and looked, frankly, terrible. Then there was the team that played in Georgia and this past weekend in Mississauga, where they were shorthanded but definitely came to play, and they played at a level that we know they’re capable of. In those two games, they played well but just not quite as well as the Swarm or Black Bears.
This was a very entertaining and physical game which looked like it might go beyond “chippy” a few times, but never did. Both goaltenders had periods where they made some great stops but also missed a few they probably should have had. Both teams took a few short-lived leads only to have the other team come back and tie it. Josh Dawick’s strong start to the season continues, and he still leads the team in goals and points after scoring four and adding three assists.
Jeff Teat was having trouble with Nick Rose in the first three quarters, taking lots of shots but missing the net a lot and only scoring once. He scored twice in the fourth quarter though and added four assists. Callum Jones (see below) was a monster, and I thought Jacob Dunbar was brought in as a “secondary scoring” sort of guy but he’s second on the team after Teat, and looked really strong.
With four seconds left in the fourth, the Rock appeared to have tied the game to send it to overtime but the goal was waved off. The evidence shown on the video board was inconclusive at best, so the Rock faithful were not happy with the call. The first photo I saw of it (since removed from twitter) once I got home also looked inconclusive to me, but a second picture did show Boushy’s foot touching the crease. It was the right call, even if it made the 5000+ Rock fans in attendance (and thousands more on TSN) unhappy.
The 0–4 in the standings is the same whether they played well in two games and bad in two others, or were just bad in all of them. But the team knows that the first two games were the anomaly and they’re over that now, so their confidence is growing. The Rock can still be a playoff contender this season, but the road to get there is quite a bit steeper now than they were expecting before the season.
Callum Jones
Callum Jones is not a big guy, listed as 6’0“ and 165 pounds, but he plays much bigger. At one point in the first quarter, he singlehandedly prevented Brad Kri (6’3”, 220 lbs) from leaving the Rock’s defensive zone, causing an eight-second violation. He did the same with another Rock defender a little while later, and was a menace to Rock forwards all night. He scored a transition goal and added an assist, but it was his defensive abilities that I was very impressed with.
Halifax’s amazing comeback
At 9:02 of the third quarter, Ethan Walker scored to give the FireWolves a commanding 9–3 lead. Right after that goal, Halifax goalie Warren Hill was pulled and backup Drew Hutchison was brought in. Hutchison finished the game with a 100% save percentage (on 12 shots) and a 0.00 GAA. Meanwhile the Thunderbirds scored ten straight to not just complete the comeback but win the game by four. Unlike Calgary’s comeback last week, this one wasn’t a one-man show – the ten goals were scored by eight different players.
The comeback itself wasn’t record-setting – they were “only” down by six, and there have been 14 comebacks of 7+ goals since 2005. The ten straight goals didn’t set a record either – there have been 8 games since 2005 where a team has scored 11+ straight goals. But the two combined made for an awesome night for the 10,595 Thunderbirds fans in attendance. And yes, the team is 1–3 but such a comeback against one of the top goalies and one of the top teams will give the Thunderbirds confidence that they, like the Rock and perhaps even more so, might have turned a corner on their season after a dismal start.
Busy barns
Attendance at almost all the games was pretty great this past weekend. Of course, Buffalo left everyone else in the dust, with a full sellout of just over 19,000 for banner raising night. Since the pandemic, Calgary has been consistently second behind the Bandits in attendance, and they had 13,094 show up for their game against Vancouver. Halifax was also over the 10k mark, as I mentioned above, and with 9,415 at Sunday afternoon’s game, Colorado just missed it. The Rock’s number of 5,196 looks pretty low but that’s the capacity of the Paramount Fine Foods Centre, and you can’t do any better than a sellout.
The one disappointing number was in Saskatchewan. The Rush’s attendance has been pretty low this season and they only got about 6,000 out to their game. The Rush have started out strong this season, so hopefully if the winning continues, the fans will return.
Christian Del Bianco
It’s still not awesome that Christian is still effectively unemployed when it comes to the NLL but I’m certainly enjoying his analysis commentary from the comfort of his living room.
— Christian Del Bianco (@cdelbianco35) December 29, 2024
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Weird
Late goal challenges
This is not “awesome” or “not awesome”, it was just strange. When the Rock’s Dan Craig scored to tie the game with four seconds left, Ottawa coach Dan Ladouceur threw the challenge flag. The ref gave it back to Ottawa captain Jeff Teat but Teat seemed to be pleading their case on why they wanted the challenge. Obviously the Black Bears wanted that goal reviewed (and as it turned out, for good reason), but surely both Laddy and Teat knew that every goal in the last two minutes of regulation and in overtime is automatically reviewed by the refs. There was no need to throw the flag and no need to convince the refs to review the goal. Of course, I couldn’t hear what Teat and the ref were saying to each other but it seemed like a wholly unnecessary conversation.
Not Awesome
Nothing!
Fans of the teams that lost this past weekend may disagree, but I have no not awesomes this week!
NLL Chatter 