The question of whether faceoffs “matter” in the NLL has come up many times over the years. I’ve tried to answer it myself statistically a couple of times, and the result of my most recent investigation (with help from Cooper Perkins) showed that if your team is great at faceoffs or terrible at faceoffs, they matter but if you’re just OK, they kind of don’t. But not everybody believes it’s as cut-and-dried as that.

The real answer is that of course they matter, the same way that power play goals matter, and loose balls matter, and caused turnovers matter, and reverse transition speed matters, and a whole bunch of other things. If you’re really good at one of those but only average at the rest, the thing you’re good at helps but not much. If you suck at one of them but are pretty good at the rest, the thing you suck at hurts but not much. But the more of those separate things you are really good at, the more likely you are to win games.

The amount that each one of those aspects of the game affects your ability to win games probably varies. Maybe faceoffs are the highest-ranking of them, and maybe not. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I say “faceoffs don’t matter”, I mean that I don’t think they matter any more than any of those other things do.

Geoff Snider and Jeremy Thompson

In the late 2000’s and early teens, Geoff Snider was the original elite face-off man. There had been great face-off guys before him including Paul Cantabene, Jamie Hanford, and Peter Jacobs, but those guys typically won between 55–63% of their faceoffs over a season. Snider got into the mid-high 70’s and was so dominant that teams sometimes changed their in-game strategies to handle him. I saw a playoff game in Buffalo in 2008 with the Bandits taking on Geoff Snider and the Wings. By the third or fourth quarter, the Bandits weren’t even sending someone out to take faceoffs, just conceding them to Snider and getting their defense ready. Snider was credited for winning 28 of 30 faceoffs in that game but some of them were against nobody. Buffalo won the game.

Geoff’s brother Bob also became an elite faceoff guy in the early teens. Later still, Jake Withers and Trevor Baptiste were the elite, and the other faceoff guys were merely very good. Eventually, we got more faceoff specialists like Nardella, Post, and Ierlan. The Sniders have long since retired but the rest of those guys are still around, along with Farrell, Ignacio, Naso, Sisselberger, and Stathakis.

From 2019–2024, Jake Withers was in Snider territory, winning 74.9% of his faceoffs. Baptiste was at 70.0%, Nardella 65.1%, and Ierlan 64.6%. In 2020 and 2023, we had two guys above 70%. In 2024, we had three.

But if we look at the 2025 numbers (as of week 13), we have Nardella at 67% (Baptiste is above that but has only played one game), a few more in the low 60’s and a few in the 50’s. We’re back to the pre-Snider days where we have one guy in the mid–60’s who’s the best in the league.

It looks like there are so many elite faceoff guys in the league now that nobody is dominant. GMs decided that faceoffs mattered so much that they all went out and got faceoff specialists, and now they’ve evened the playing field. Everybody’s great and faceoffs don’t matter anymore.

When everybody’s super, nobody is.