Recently I wrote about non-players who deserve consideration for induction to the NLL Hall of Fame once their careers are over. In that article, I covered owners as well as broadcasters and today I’m going to cover GMs, coaches and officials.

GMs and Coaches

Derek Keenan

As a GM, I imagine the best case scenario for a single season would be to take a franchise from missing the playoffs to the Championship the very next year. Derek Keenan has done that three times over his career:

• The Portland LumberJax missed the playoffs in 2007 and went to the Championship game in 2008. This was the third season in Portland history.
• The Edmonton Rush missed the playoffs in 2011 and went to the Championship game in 2012. They were a combined 31–65 over the previous six seasons.
• Before heading to the Championship series in 2025, the Saskatchewan Rush had missed the playoffs in each of the previous three seasons.

All three of these teams lost the Championship those years, but just getting there was an amazing achievement. He did win a few Championships as a GM though, once in 2015 with Edmonton and twice with Saskatchewan in 2016 and 2018.

He also coached most of those teams (or co-coached in the case of the ’25 Rush), and I don’t know what was more impressive – the teams he put together as a GM or the teams he brought together as a coach. Keenan is the winningest coach in NLL history and shows no sign of slowing down.

Keenan has won the GM of the Year award four times and the Les Bartley award four times, more than anyone else for either award. He won both of them in 2006, 2010, and 2014, one of only four people to win them both in the same year and the only one to do it more than once. Keenan could go into the Hall of Fame as a GM, even if he’d never coached a game. He could also go in as a coach, even if he had never been a GM. The fact that he was so good at both is remarkable.

Curt Malawsky

Malawsky became the head coach of the Calgary Roughnecks in 2013. While his tenure with the Roughnecks lasted ten seasons and only resulted in one Championship (2019), the Roughnecks only missed the playoffs once in that span. The stats can’t show this but I couldn’t count the number of Roughnecks players who I heard interviewed over that time who talked about how much of an impact Malawsky made on their lacrosse careers and even on their lives off the floor. He was able to get the best out of all of his players, and brought some players to levels even they had no idea they were capable of.

He moved to Vancouver two years ago and the impact he’s had on that team has been incalculable. He brought a team that had played a single playoff game in the previous ten years into the playoffs in 2025 where not only did they earn a home game but they won it and got to the second round, losing to the eventual Champion Bandits. The confidence and excitement around NLL lacrosse in Vancouver hasn’t been this high since at least the Ravens days.

As their GM, he’s already been able to bring some big-name players to the Warriors, players you were unlikely to see sign with Vancouver beforehand. Seriously – would Christian Del Bianco have demanded to be traded to Vancouver if they were still a 4–14 team and Mouse wasn’t there? Malawsky is known as a fiery and intense coach, but players are falling over themselves to get the chance to play for him.

Mike Hasen

When people talk about the best coaches in NLL history, the name Mike Hasen doesn’t always seem to come up right away. But Hasen coached the Knighthawks to three straight Championships from 2012–2014, the first team ever to do that. He’s only won the Les Bartley award once, and that was the season before that three-peat. He had a couple of lean years where the [old] Knighthawks missed the playoffs in three out of four years (though they went to the finals in the fourth), and then with the new Knighthawks where they went 6–24 in two years but they’ve made the playoffs in each of the last three seasons.

Hasen is not as fiery as Cordingley or Malawsky but he still gets the best out of his players and has found a lot of success. If you can be a head coach in the same city in any sport for 14 years, you deserve to be considered among the best coaches around.

Troy Cordingley

Troy Cordingley is one of the few head coaches to win Championships in two different cities (Calgary 2009, Toronto 2011), and was only the second coach to win the Les Bartley award more than once (2009 and 2013). It has been said that he basically invented the “pressure defense”, a strategy used almost universally in the NLL in the 2010’s. Cordingley was frequently the stereotypical “fiery” coach during a game, screaming and swearing and generally looking like he’s ready to rip someone’s head off. But off the floor, he is (or was) a primary school teacher, so clearly he can keep his emotions in check when necessary. And similar to Malawsky, there have been a lot of players who have talked about learning a lot from him and wanting to play for him.

Officials

Some officials work even more games in a season than players do – and remember, they are on the floor for the entire game, running back and forth from one end to the other. The O refs don’t get to go to the bench and sit for a couple of minutes while the D refs are on the floor. Labranche is in his late 50’s*, a decade older than John Tavares was when he retired from playing, and about 15 years older than the oldest active player (Matt Vinc). Like ’em or hate ’em (they are refs, after all), you have to admit that they work their asses off.

* – I couldn’t find an age for Gardonio, but I suspect he’s around the same age.

Todd Labranche

Todd Labranche might be the most famous of all NLL referees, given his 2018 penalty call that went viral, when he sent two players who were “clearly having issues with each other” off to the box “to think about what they’ve done”.

Labranche was the first ref to work more than 400 NLL games, hitting that plateau in 2022. Remember, only three players have ever reached three hundred games in the NLL (Dan Dawson, John Tavares, and Matt Vinc), and Labranche hit four hundred three years ago. And he’s still going.

Mark Gardonio

Gardonio is second behind only Labranche in games reffed, having hit the 400 game plateau just this past season. He hasn’t gone viral but like most referees, he usually only gets noticed when he makes a mistake, and that’s far less often than most fans believe. Only the best of the best get to officiate twenty-plus years at the highest level of any sport.