Only one game left. The Rush refused to be taken out in two games, and the Bandits lost their first playoff game in almost two years (Game 2 of their Championship series against the Mammoth in 2023). The 2025 season is now down to one game, next Saturday afternoon (at an unusual 4:30pm EDT start time) in Buffalo. Both teams have strong defences, incredible goaltending, and powerful offences so it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen, but low-scoring games have been far more common in these playoffs than high-scoring games. I’d expect more of the same – a low-scoring, close, exciting game that’s down to the wire.

SSK @ BUF, Game 1

This was a very entertaining game, as expected. Back and forth all night, with the Rush leading by two five different times, but never more than two. The Bandits only led in the second for four minutes and then from 11:36 of the third to the end of the game, but only by one for most of that time. Every time it looked like either team was gaining a bit of momentum, the other team stepped in and shut it down.

More scoring than I was expecting, but it still hit the Under 22.5 that I bet on so I’m happy about that. Both goaltenders were very good, though maybe less incredible than in previous rounds. Vinc made a couple of sliding stack-the-pads saves that are common in hockey but you don’t often see in lacrosse. He was money when the Rush players were in close, like usual, but did allow a few more goals from distance than we’re used to.

At the other end of the floor, there were a few cases of a powerhouse Bandits forward (pick any of them) getting through the Rush defense and taking a point-blank shot but Scigliano was able to make the save. The posts and crossbars at both ends also made a number of stops.

Ball movement at both ends was incredible. There were a couple of goals where the scorer had a huge empty cage to shoot on because there were nine quick passes instead of the eight the goaltender was expecting. And all nine of those passes happened within about three seconds.

Chase Fraser takes flight

The Bandits defense seemed to be having a rough night for a while, allowing a few open looks that they usually prevent. But they got it together later in the game and were amazing in the fourth quarter, keeping the Rush off the board from 8:17 of the third to the end of the game. We shouldn’t take anything away from the Rush defense either. The Bandits took the lead late in the third, but the Rush D kept their team in the game by allowing no goals for the last 16½ minutes other than one fluky, almost accidental, empty-net goal by Kyle Buchanan.

I remember watching Levi Anderson in a pre-season game at the TRAC and thought that, in the words of Pat Gregoire, this guy is going to be a problem. He’s big, he’s strong, he can score, he can make space, he’s everything you want from a forward. Then he played three games in December, two in February, and one in April. He was not injured. Maybe he was fighting Clark Walter for a spot on the offense, and the Rush understandably had no interest in taking Walter out of the lineup. But the way Anderson has played when he’s been in the lineup, you’d think they’d find a way to get him in there more often, and I thought he played a great game on Friday night.

BUF @ SSK, Game 2

Game two sounds a bit like a replay of Game one: a couple of early goals by the Rush, Buffalo battles back and takes the lead, then the lead bounces back and forth between the two teams, Austin Shanks scores a go-ahead goal in the fourth quarter, and Kyle Buchanan scores the last goal of the game with an assist by Dhane Smith. But instead of the last four goals of the game going to Buffalo to steal the win, they only scored one to get within two. The Rush held on to force game three next weekend.

This was another goalie battle; again not a record-setting low-scoring game or anything, but just like game one, both goalies came to play. The Rush defense was excellent, reminiscent of the Rush’s defensive dominance from about 2013–2018. Buffalo’s offense was a little uncharacteristically sloppy here and there, though the defense was still strong and the shot soaking didn’t slow down at all.

But the biggest shot soak of the game was in the dying seconds of the fourth quarter: with the Bandits desperately trying to tie the game, Chase Fraser took a hard shot with under a second left and Holden Garlent put his head down, ready to take the shot off his helmet. It actually missed his helmet but ended up hitting him in the hand, and he dropped to the turf in obvious pain. But the shot did not get to the net, which was the intention. Kudos to Garlent for being ready and willing to take one off the melon to protect the lead.

Austin Shanks continues to make his mark on the Rush. He now has 16 goals and 14 assists in five playoff games, and leads all players in the playoffs this year in goals and points. Shanks has never won a Championship, though he did get to the finals in 2018 with the (old) Rochester Knighthawks. They lost that year to the Saskatchewan Rush.

Austin Shanks tucks it home

Credit where it’s due: I’ve criticized the Rush faithful a couple of times recently for not showing up to playoff games, but attendance in Saskatchewan for game two was 8,216. No, it’s not where they were a few years ago, but 3k higher than last weekend so kudos to Rush Nation for showing up. And regardless of how many people were there, it certainly sounded loud on TV.

Props to rookie Jake Naso, who has been amazing at the face-off dot during the playoffs. He has won 60.7% of his faceoffs in the playoffs. He’s been over 50% in all five Rush games, beating Jeremy Thompson, Jake Withers twice, and Connor Farrell twice. And he does more than just take faceoffs.

Stat I wouldn’t have bet on before the playoffs started regardless of the odds: through five playoff games, Ian MacKay has 15 goals and Josh Byrne has three.

Awesome

Award winners

The NLL announced the winners of the annual awards this past week. In all, there were 12 awards given out, with eight of them going to either Buffalo or Saskatchewan. The only exceptions were MVP (Rochester), Transition (Vancouver), Rookie (Albany), and Executive (Vancouver). You could say nine out of thirteen if you include the Championship series MVP award which will obviously go to a player on Buffalo or Saskatchewan. These are the two best teams in the league, so you’d expect that some of the best players would come from those teams, but the winners of these awards are usually a bit more spread out.

It was good to see longtime Bandits announcer John Gurtler finally get his Tom Borrelli award. Not only has he been calling Bandits games forever, but he also writes a weekly column called “Gurts Fast Break” for the Bandits web site. Plus he’s interviewed me earlier this season so that makes him pretty awesome in my eyes.

Congrats to Derek Keenan and Jimmy Quinlan on their GM / Bartley awards. I know how the voting works, and I believe both men are deserving of their awards. Yet when I heard the results, I admit I was a bit surprised that Curt Malawsky got neither of these awards. But both the Warriors and the Rush have missed the playoffs for several years including last year, and were then rebuilt into excellent teams that made the playoffs this year. Maybe the fact that Saskatchewan won a Championship as recently as 2018 while Vancouver has been terrible forever makes me believe that the Vancouver rebuild was more significant, and maybe it was. But my opinion differing from the actual results doesn’t make them wrong.

One thing that I found odd is that Keenan and Quinlan are listed as co-head coaches, but Quinlan got the nomination by himself. Apparently this was at the request of the team. In 2019, Bandits co-head coaches John Tavares and Rich Kilgour were both named as Les Bartley Award winners.

Not Awesome

Ref’s mics again

Maybe the microphones are supplied by the arena and it has nothing to do with the league. But good god, can’t we get microphones that work? I swear that every announcement a ref had to make was either silent or pieces of it were silent. The refs frequently think they forgot to turn their mic on, but then they flicked the switch and it still didn’t work.

Right after SSK/BUF Game one ended, I switched over to Maple Leafs / Panthers game six, and when the ref had to announce something, the microphones worked perfectly. I was jealous.

Update after game two: More credit where it’s due: the microphones worked fine in Saskatchewan. Irony: I switched to Maple Leafs / Panthers game seven at halftime and saw a Panthers goal that was waved off. When the ref tried to explain that they were reviewing the goal, his microphone didn’t work.

FOGOs

In Sunday’s game, Connor Farrell won a faceoff, then ran around his defensive zone, then tried an ill-advised bounce pass right in front of a Rush defender. The pass was easily picked off and the Rush ended up with an easy scoring play. There is no use in having an elite faceoff guy if he wins a faceoff and then turns it over on a sloppy play.

Obviously if you can get a Withers or Ierlan or Nardella so you have an elite faceoff guy AND a pretty good defender, that’s ideal. But if you can’t have that, I would much rather have a defender who’s pretty good at faceoffs than a guy who’s excellent at faceoffs but nothing else. I continue to wonder why the term “FOGO” is not considered an insult.