Another busy weekend in the NLL with seven games. Blowouts were the name of the game this weekend, as four of the seven games featured a team that led by at least nine goals and three of them led by eleven. To balance things out, we had a one-goal game and a two-goal game, but most of the games were decided well before the fourth quarter even started.

I have more Not Awesomes than Awesomes this week, which is unusual, but even the Not Awesomes aren’t really that bad.

Awesome

Thunderbirds take down Rush

The Rush are having a great season and Frank Scigliano is one of the top goalies in the league. But on Friday night in Halifax, the Thunderbirds did not care about any of that. In a nutshell, Warren Hill was excellent, the Halifax defense was excellent, and the offense was even better, putting 17 goals in the Rush net. Oddly, the last time the Rush gave up 17 goals, it was against the Thunderbirds last year.

The return of Randy Staats to the lineup was certainly helpful, and Clarke Petterson and Cody Jamieson had good games as well, but the story here was the play of rookie Mike Robinson. The Peterborough rookie had the best game of his NLL career, scoring three and adding four assists. Halifax is now tied for third place and with games like that, Robinson will be a huge boost to the Thunderbirds as they try to nail down that elusive home playoff game.

This was the second sell-out this season for Halifax. The Nest has become quite a difficult place to play for visiting teams.

Halifax goaltender Warren Hill practicing his levitation

Frank Scigliano

I saw a comment online after the Rush/Thunderbirds game saying something like “Scigliano isn’t the answer”. If that’s the case, I’m not sure what question you’re asking. He’s 8–3, fourth among starters in save percentage, first among starters in GAA, and third in GSAA. He has almost identical numbers to his career best season, 2022 as a member of the San Diego Seals. No, he wasn’t great on Friday but it was likely a blip for both Scigliano and the Rush. It happens. Scigliano has been criticized in the past for losing steam as the season goes on, but it’s one game so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt for now. If he has similar struggles in the next couple of games, we will certainly revisit this but for now, I’d still consider him one of the top three goalies in the league this year.

Christian Del Bianco

Before the Toronto/Calgary game, I figured Christian Del Bianco would be a little rusty, since he hadn’t played in the NLL in almost a year, It would take some time, possibly a quarter or two but more likely 5–10 minutes, before he could shake off that rust. As it turns out, if there was any rust there at all, it was a barely perceptible period of time before it was gone and he was back to playing like himself. I had almost forgot how entertaining he is as a goalie. He’s so much fun to watch.

In addition to all of the amazing and athletic stops he makes, he’s one of the best outlet passers in the league, and had a few nice ones in this game, one of which resulted in a goal.

Albany attendance

The crowd in Albany this weekend was awesome for two reasons. First, it’s just been organically growing over the course of the season. Their first game had 4,883 people but the next couple of games dropped a bit in attendance, as is fairly typical for NLL teams*. Those two had around 3,800 people, then they had three games over 4,000. Then Saturday’s game was 6,405, beating their highest of the season by almost 1,500. They announced that it was the biggest crowd in team history but that’s not quite true – they got 6,663 at a game back in 2022 (assuming that game sheet is correct).

Remember, this is for a team that was 4–9 before Saturday’s game and likely out of the playoffs.

The other reason it was awesome is an initiative called Tickets for Heroes. Anyone could buy tickets for this game and then donate them to first responders and members of the military. This awesome program brought in more than 700 donated tickets. Kudos to the FireWolves for coming up with this idea.

Note that even without those extra 700 fans, the attendance at Saturday’s game would have been the highest of the season.

* – This season, every team except Georgia, Halifax, Philly, and Saskatchewan had lower attendance in home game 2 than home game 1. Toronto’s was a touch higher but they’ve basically filled the barn in every game. Rochester’s was also higher in game two but that was against the Bandits and a good chunk of the fans in the arena were Bandits fans who made the drive from Buffalo.

Not Awesome

Mammoth lose Eli McLaughlin

A week after announcing the Zed Williams will miss the rest of the season, the Mammoth announced that Eli McLaughlin is on the hold-out list. We were just talking about first responders, and McLaughlin is working to become a firefighter in Vancouver so he has to do some sort of probation. I don’t know the details but long story short: it will prevent McLaughlin from playing with the Mammoth. The press release didn’t say how long McLaughlin will be out, but apparently it’s typically six months. I know previous NLL players doing the same thing have missed entire seasons because of it. They didn’t explicitly say that McLaughlin is done for the season but there was no mention of his return.

Note that this is only not awesome for the Mammoth; it’s very awesome for McLaughlin. Being a firefighter is one of the toughest jobs there is; whether it’s fires, car accidents, or other life-threatening situations, he’ll be running towards the danger while everyone else is running away from it. It’s also mentally taxing – similar to paramedics and ER doctors, he will see a great many people on the worst day of their lives. Kudos to McLaughlin for taking this step and for choosing this path.

Blowouts

Unless you’re a fan of the winning team, blowouts are rarely all that exciting to watch. It’s just one team seemingly scoring at will while the other can’t buy a goal. You can see the frustration on the faces of the players and coaches of the losing team. The goalies are usually swapped, and sometimes swapped one or more times again later. It’s certainly not unusual for there to be some physicality near the end of the game as the losing team’s frustration boils over.

This past weekend we had a few of them:

• Vancouver was up on Toronto by nine twice, and only a 4–0 fourth quarter by Toronto made the score as close as it was. The game wasn’t really that close.
• Halifax was up by 11 on Saskatchewan, finishing with an eight-goal win
• Rochester was up by 11 on Ottawa a couple of times and won by ten
• San Diego was up by 11 on Las Vegas a couple of times and won by nine

They’re gonna happen, though they’re a bit easier to watch when it’s your team that’s winning. I’m not suggesting that there should be rule changes to avoid them or anything like that but personally, I’d much rather watch an 9–8 battle than a 17–7 blowout. That said, the San Diego / Las Vegas game was pretty entertaining even once the game was out of hand.

Useless goal reviews

Rochester was leading Ottawa 18–7 with three minutes left in the fourth quarter when the Knighthawks scored a goal. Ottawa then challenged the goal call saying that the shooter touched down in the crease before the ball crossed the line. Just to reiterate, Ottawa was down by eleven goals with three minutes to play. I get that you never want to just give up on a game, or at least you never want to appear to give up on a game, but be realistic. Even if the challenge was good and the goal was disallowed, the Black Bears were not going to score eleven goals in three minutes. Nobody cares that they lost by ten instead of eleven. Other than preventing Zach Higgins’s GAA from going up even more than it already had, there was no real point to this challenge.

Yes, it turns out that they were right and the goal was disallowed, but I think it was still a waste of time.

Ref microphones

At least two different games featured refs who had malfunctioning microphones. This is such a simple problem to test and solve, I’m surprised we see this more than once or twice a season.

First initial, last name

There are two guys named Dickson on the Roughnecks (Curtis and Haiden, no relation), but both jerseys just say “Dickson” with no first initial. A few years ago, the Roughnecks also had a guy named Carter Dickson (no relation to either of the other Dicksons), so they probably decided then that having two guys with “C. Dickson” was equally unhelpful, so they didn’t bother with the initial. That’s annoying but the real Not Awesome here is that all of the stats pages that the NLL produces use “First initial Last name” when listing players. Here is an example of a game sheet where you can see that all the goals are listed like “S.Jackson from T.Eccleston and B.Bomberry”.

When creating the data for nllstats.com, I have to read these files and figure out who did what, and I have had to add a fair bit of logic to handle cases where there are multiple players with the same “First initial last name” in a game. A few years ago, we had Jason and Jeremy Noble in the league, so I added logic to distinguish the two J. Nobles based on team. Since these two never played on the same team, this was fine. But when the two C. Dicksons played on the same team, I was concerned that I would have to manually update every single Roughnecks game to handle this. Luckily Carter only played one game in his career and had no goals or assists so I didn’t have anything to do. Sorry Carter, I’m being selfish here – I’m not actually celebrating the fact that your NLL career was short, it just saved me some inconvenience.

There are three C. Kirsts who play or have played in the NLL: Cole on Halifax, Connor on Las Vegas, and Colin who played in one game for Las Vegas in 2023. But there are two more Kirst brothers out there that may play in the NLL in the future: CJ and Caden. If two of the five end up on the same team, I’ll be back to having the same problem where I may not be able to distinguish between them. I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it but I’m not looking forward to it. Please NLL, just use the player’s full name on the game sheets.