The NLL is back! The 2026 season began last Friday with the first-ever game in Oshawa, followed by three games on Saturday in Buffalo, Ottawa, and Vancouver. Buffalo won their game, which surprised pretty much nobody, Colorado beat the heavily favoured Vancouver Warriors in an upset, and the other two games were kind of in the middle in terms of surprising results.

If you’re new to NLL Chatter, welcome! In these weekly reports, I won’t give you game summaries where I just list the goals and who scored them, since other places do that. Instead, I’ll go over Awesome things that happened over the weekend and some things that… aren’t so awesome. Sometimes the thing that’s awesome or not awesome is a player, sometimes it’s a team, sometimes it’s a game, sometimes it’s a specific play within a game, sometimes it’s a trade, it could be anything. There will be weeks where there are no Not Awesomes, but this is lacrosse, and so there won’t be any weeks without anything Awesome. Let’s get started.

Awesome

Goaltending in Oshawa

What a debut for both Nick Rose and Doug Jamieson. Rose had a GAA of 8.00 and a save percentage of 80% and lost. Jamieson was 7.00 and 87.3%. Both came up big on breakaways, dunk attempts, and dives, and both made more than one “no way, how’d he stop that?” saves. It’s not unusual for these two goalies to have great games like this, but to start off the season, it was awesome to watch.

Oshawa FireWolves debut

Game one in Oshawa was exactly what you’d want for a new team. The building wasn’t quite sold out but close; attendance was listed as 5,394 while the arena holds 6,152. The fans were generally loud and even louder when the FireWolves scored. Both teams played well and the game was close throughout but in the end, the home team pulled off a win. Even the face of the team, Dyson Williams, who grew up in Oshawa, scored a goal.

As an aside, I can’t say I’m thrilled with a new NLL team in an arena that only holds 6k. Selling almost 90% of the available tickets is great, if that continues. If they can pull in 5–6k per game and not lose money, that’s also great. But the numbers don’t look that good and it leaves no room for improvement.

Anyway, back to the game. Of the 15 goals scored, only two of them didn’t tie the game or break a tie. There was a single two-goal lead in the game – in the second quarter, Oshawa took a two-goal lead and held it for 52 seconds before Toronto got one back, and then the Rock tied it yet again early in the third.

As I mentioned above, both goaltenders were amazing and both teams looked in mid-season form. There were very few dropped balls or missed passes or things like that that you would normally see in early-season games. We can only hope that the excitement (and result) of the game keeps people coming back and brings new fans in so we see that high attendance percentage throughout the season.

Colorado Mammoth

After losing a bunch of offensive players including Zed Williams, Connor Robinson, and Connor Kelly, and still missing Eli McLaughlin, I wasn’t too optimistic about the Mammoth’s offense this year. Yes, they still have Will Malcom and Ryan Lee, and they added Andrew Kew, but as good as those guys are, the team is going to need more than just those three to score. Well, they didn’t really on Saturday. Kew looks like he’s going to fit in very well with Malcom and Lee. The only other Mammoth player to score was Dylan McIntosh, who scored the last goal of the game. The Vancouver offense was a bit unsettled all night (see Not Awesome below), but credit to the Mammoth defense for keeping them that way, and to Dillon Ward for stopping almost everything that got through the defense. I still think they’ll need more secondary scoring but I’m big on giving credit where it’s due, and the Colorado Mammoth played a hell of a game on Saturday.

Predictions gone awry

I’m listing this under Awesome because it’s always more interesting when unexpected things happen. In my pre-season predictions (Part I, Part II), I listed both Georgia and San Diego as missing the playoffs. I’m not saying I’m totally rescinding that and we should buy tickets for their home playoff games, but both teams played very well in game one.

Georgia held their own against the defending champs and gave them a run for their money. Lyle Thompson may have had the worst game of his career, picking up just a single assist, and some of the patented Lyle plays just weren’t working. On the other hand, Shayne Jackson had six points, Kaleb Benedict five and Bryan Cole three, and four different rookies picked up at least two points each: Grace, Byrne, Trumble, and Page. Brett Dobson didn’t have his best game, though he had a higher save percentage than Matt Vinc. Devlin Shanahan came in when Dobson was serving his penalty (more on that here) and stopped six of seven shots in five minutes, so he had a higher save percentage than both of them. If Dobson and Thompson both return to form, this is a team that could surprise some people, particularly me.

San Diego did better than just play well, they beat the Ottawa Black Bears, and were pretty much in command the whole game. They took a 6–0 lead and didn’t allow a Black Bears goal until halfway through the second quarter. They got a ton of production from Tre Leclaire, and six players recorded at least four points. Zach Currier had 18 loose balls and Trevor Baptiste won 87.9% of his face-offs. Chris Origlieri was untouchable for a while but had other periods where he didn’t play so well but hey, game one.

I also picked Colorado to miss the playoffs, and they got their own Awesome section above.

So kudos to those three teams for keeping me on my toes. So the challenge is out there for the Wings, Roughnecks, and Desert Dogs: surprise me.

New replay system

The League has implemented a new review system which will be a game-changer for refs and coaches. The new system allows refs to see as many camera angles as possible and control the replays themselves. In the past, the ref could see the camera views one at a time, but had to talk to someone over the phone who had control over the playback. They’d have to tell the guy on the phone “back up a bit, ok stop, ok now go forward really slowly, WHOA STOP RIGHT THERE, oh we missed it. Go back like two seconds…”

In addition, all the cameras are synced, which means that as you advance one of them a handful of frames, the others all go forward by the same number of frames. This is huge. If you can see the shot clock in one camera but not the ball, and in another camera you can see the ball and whether or not it’s crossed the goal line but you can’t see the shot clock, it’s hard to say whether or not the goal should count, and you can’t use the two views together to see what you need. But if they’re synced and you can advance them a frame at a time simultaneously, problem solved.

But not only is all of the above available for the refs doing the review, it’s also available to the coaches on the bench so they can have a look at the previous play and decide whether or not to throw the challenge flag. With all of that information available, they’re less likely to throw the flag if they know the call won’t be going their way.

The only drawback so far is that the reviews took a very long time, even for a couple of plays that seemed quite clear. But that’s probably just everyone getting used to the new technology. I expect it will get faster as the season progresses.

Not Awesome

Vancouver Warriors

I’ve put Vancouver in the Not Awesome category so many times over the years, but this is for a completely different reason. It’s not because they played badly or had terrible attendance, like previous articles, it’s because they didn’t play as well as we all expected. That’s new. Christian Del Bianco and Dillon Ward were both amazing in the first quarter and then slowly started to show a few tiny cracks in their armour. Both had very good nights but Del Bianco looked a little more human than he did over the last six games (plus playoffs) of last year.

Vancouver’s offense had a lot of changes as well, and they just looked a bit lost out there. Unlike the FireWolves and Rock, the Warriors did not look in mid-season form, they looked like a bunch of guys who weren’t terribly familiar with all of their teammates. It’s not entirely unexpected, and nobody thinks they were overrated and this game showed who they really are. They’ll be better.

Goalie serving their own penalties

Brett Dobson received a major penalty in Saturday’s Swarm game in Buffalo, and was forced to serve the penalty himself. To say this is unusual is an understatement. I’ve already written about it so I won’t repeat it all here.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that goalies should or should not serve their own penalties. The Not Awesome here is that the rule is not clear.

Will Malcom’s name spelled wrong

On Will Malcom’s jersey, his name was spelled “Malcolm”. I know it was a mistake and nobody is intentionally disrespecting him, but come on, that just can’t happen. It’s not like he’s a new player, he was on the team last year as well.