That will do it for the 2025 regular season. Seems like just a few weeks ago we were getting ready to start the season and now it’s already over. But of course, the playoffs are an entirely different beast, and even though there are no more than thirteen games left before the long off-season, those games will be the most meaningful ones played all season. There was an awful lot of Awesome this past week, so let’s get into it.

Awesome

Being interviewed

I was interviewed twice last week, once for a podcast and once for an article on NLL.com. In fact, both interviews took place within about 3 hours of each other.

I first talked to Anna Taylor from the NLL, mostly about the playoff positions and percentages as well as the unified standings but also about my NLLStats.com web site and where it came from. She talked to both me and Evan Schemenauer at the same time, since Evan is very knowledgeable about the playoff situations and also does a lot of work in that area, calculating percentages and clinching / elimination scenarios. I’ve communicated with both Anna and Evan many times over the years, via Twitter or email, but had never actually spoken to either one. Anna’s article was posted on Thursday. Thanks to Anna for including me in the article and making me sound knowledgeable!

A couple of hours later, I talked to Adam Levi and was honoured to be Adam’s guest on the 100th episode of the Lacrosse Matrix podcast. We had a great conversation mostly about stats and NLLStats.com, but we also discussed a bit about how I discovered lacrosse and started writing about it, where the idea for NLLStats.com came from, the Rock, the Rush, the Bandits, playoff percentages and more. We talked for an hour and could easily have kept going for another.

Congratulations to Adam on the 100th episode of the Lacrosse Matrix podcast, and thanks so much for having me on as your 100th guest!

Halifax gets a home playoff game

As a Rock fan, I can’t say I was pleased with the outcome of Friday’s Rock/Thunderbirds game. But as an NLL fan, Halifax getting a home playoff game is awesome. They have had some great crowds in the Nest over the last few years, and the interest and excitement about the Thunderbirds in Halifax seems to be growing and growing. The crowd at their first round game should be amazing, and if they manage to get to the second round or beyond, there’s no saying how loud they could get. Other than Buffalo, I’m not sure there’s a bigger home-floor advantage in the NLL than Halifax.

A full house in Halifax

Troy Holowchuk

You don’t often include a goalie in an Awesome list when he gives up 16 goals in one game, but on Friday, Holowchuk tied Brandon Miller’s Rock record of 70 shots faced, made some pretty amazing saves, and kept the team in the game for most of it. Then on Saturday night in Rochester, he played even better, facing 65 shots and only allowing ten goals for the win.

Holowchuk became only the second goaltender in the past twenty years to make 50+ saves on consecutive nights. Matt Vinc also did it in March 2022.

Georgia takes out Buffalo to make the playoffs

The situation was simple for the Swarm: win and you make the playoffs, lose and you’re done for the season. That’s a lot of pressure right there, but they also had to beat the first-place Buffalo Bandits to do that. But the Swarm had a strong game and an amazing performance by Brett Dobson, holding the powerhouse Bandits scoreless for the final 20 minutes of the game. Yes, the Bandits had nothing to play for and the result of the game didn’t really matter to them, but if you think they took it easy on the Swarm because of that, I think you’re fooling yourself. They’re still the freakin’ Bandits.

Calgary takes out Colorado to make the playoffs

The situation for both Calgary and Colorado was the same as Georgia – win and you’re in, lose and you’re done. Colorado had almost the definition of an up-and-down season – they won their opener and then alternated wins and losses for the next eleven games before winning two in a row. But then their offense was decimated and they lost four straight before Saturday’s game.

Calgary’s season wasn’t much better – they were 6–6 when they traded for Nick Rose. But then Rose went 4–2 over the last six games, allowing less than ten goals in their last three.

So going into this game, Calgary’s star was on the rise while Colorado’s was falling. Unsurprisingly, Colorado was only able to score five on Rosey and the Roughnecks grabbed the last playoff spot.

Jacob Hickey

Hickey scored the first goal in his career on Saturday night, which is pretty awesome by itself, but it was even better than that. Hickey’s goal was the go-ahead goal in Georgia’s last game of the season, a game they had to win in order to make the playoffs, and ended up being the game-winner.

Attendance

The attendance for the final weekend was amazing:

• In Vancouver, the upper bowl was open for the first time ever, and they had 10,876 fans through the doors. That’s not only the second-best attendance in Vancouver Warriors history, but the second-best in franchise history, including the Vancouver Stealth, Washington Stealth, San Jose Stealth, and Albany Attack.
• Calgary had over 15,000 at their game against the Mammoth, their second-highest of the season.
• Rochester had their second-highest crowd of the year as well. The only one that beat it was when they hosted Buffalo, and that one only had nine more people than this one.
• San Diego, not known for high attendance at all, had their highest crowd of the year, a very respectable 8,697. This was also the team’s highest since their inaugural season of 2019.
• Toronto had its highest crowd of the year, after they’d already been eliminated from the playoffs. 5,235 doesn’t sound like much, but that’s all the Paramount Fine Foods Centre can hold. The Rock were first overall a year ago and dropped to 5–11 this year and were out of the playoffs. They still managed to fill their barn.

Buffalo didn’t host a game this past weekend but we have to acknowledge their accomplishment this season. They had four sellouts and set a new NLL record for average attendance with 18,470 per game.

The highest attendance at any game outside Buffalo this season was 16,443 in Calgary. Buffalo’s lowest attendance, 17,240, beat that by 800 and Buffalo’s average beat that by over 2,000. Incredible.

Lil Bro

I saw a kid wearing a Thunderbirds jersey at the HFX/TOR game – the name on the back of the jersey was “Nonkon’s Lil Bro”.

Lacrosse families

Over the years, I’ve sat near a number of families of NLL players. I sat behind John Grant, Jr.’s sister at a Peterborough Lakers game once. Phil Mazzuca’s mom has season tickets near mine at Rock games. Jeff Teat’s family sat near us for his first game in Toronto as a member of the Riptide; they stood up and cheered whenever he got a goal or assist but by the third quarter, they stopped doing that. I think they were exhausted from standing up and sitting down all night. Every game he plays is like leg day.

On Friday night, my wife stood up to high-five people near us on the first Rock goal, but the couple behind us wouldn’t partake. Afterwards, they explained that they weren’t being anti-social – their nephew Mike Robinson plays for Halifax so they weren’t going to cheer for Rock goals. Totally understandable. Robinson scored a couple and we turned and high-fived them.

NLL+ Multi-view

Last week, I mentioned a feature I’d like to see added to NLL+ Multi-view: the ability to automatically rearrange the screens as games started and finished. This week, I got my wish. The multi-view stream started late (due to human error, not because of technical problems) so there were two games on, but when the third started, the two existing views shifted up and a third was added. Then a fourth when that game started, then the TOR/ROC game ended and that view vanished, and then the fifth one started. (I don’t exactly remember the order of things, but it all worked as you’d expect.) Kudos to the technical crew for adding that awesome feature.

Not Awesome

Rock loose balls

As I mentioned last week, my wife is no lacrosse analyst; she sees a handful of games per year and that’s about it. She doesn’t even read the articles I write. (I know, I can’t imagine it either.) But she mentioned during the game on Friday that the Rock were getting killed on rebounds and loose balls. She was bang-on: the Rock gathered 52 LBs on Friday while Halifax scooped 100. Maybe 20 of those were due to face-offs, but that still leaves a differential of about 30. At one point in the third quarter, the Rock took a delayed penalty so Halifax pulled their goalie and went 6-on–5. The T-Birds must have had five or six straight possessions that resulted in a shot but kudos to Troy Holowchuk for stopping them all before the Rock finally grabbed possession. I don’t think there was any blood left in the ref’s arm because he’d held it up for so long.

More long reviews

I’ve talked about long reviews before and this time, it was the automatic review of a major penalty taken by Toronto’s Josh Jubenville. They only had two views of the play and neither was really definitive but they played them over and over and over again for at least five minutes before finally reducing the major to a minor. It just took way too long. Once again, I am asking for a hard limit on how long these reviews can take. If it’s more than maybe two minutes, you have to call it inconclusive and move on.