Only two games in Week two but lots to talk about, including one of the best goaltending performances ever, an amazing NLL debut goal, and a big comeback. Let get right to it.

Awesome

NLL clarifies the goalie penalty issue

Last week I mentioned the weird case of Georgia’s season opener, when goaltender Brett Dobson was forced to sit in the penalty box for a penalty he was given. This was weird, and the rule book was a bit vague, so nobody really knew what to make of it. The NLL clarified the situation with an announcement during the week, just saying that the refs were wrong and Dobson should not have served the penalty. It’s unfortunate that it happened, but Georgia backup Devlin Shanahan stopped six of seven shots during the penalty so in the end, it wasn’t a huge deal. Georgia’s loss wasn’t related to the ref’s mistake.

Warren Hill

Warren Hill has had great games before, but he was on another level on Friday night. He allowed a Tye Kurtz goal a couple of minutes in, and then another Kurtz goal about ten minutes after that, and that’s it. NLL records set or tied in that game:

• Longest time without allowing a goal: 46:41
• Fewest goals allowed in a game: 2 (tied with Bob Watson and Matt Vinc)
• Highest save percentage in a full game: 96.1%
• Fewest goal scorers for one team in a game: 1
• Second game ever to feature three shutout quarters for one team
• First game in NLL history to feature an 11–2 final score (Scorigami!)

The FireWolves offense clearly didn’t have a great game (see below). But they weren’t really terrible either. They had a lot of chances, and some were really good. Hill and the Halifax defense were just up to the task.

Warren Hill

Kyle Pepper’s first NLL goal

A player’s first NLL goal is always a special occasion, but Pepper’s goal was a thing of beauty. Near the end of the second quarter, Pepper picked up the ball in his own end, raced up the floor, deked around Matt Hossack (last year’s Defender of the Year) like he’d been doing it for years, and then buried it top corner while diving forward through the crease. That would have been an impressive goal for any NLL player, let alone someone playing in their first game.

Pat Gregoire

Pat Gregoire is one of the league’s best broadcasters. He knows the game inside out and backwards, he’s as unbiased as they come, and he’s a lot of fun to listen to. His “are you kidding me?!” after a great play is as iconic as Teddy Jenner’s “Oh my goodness”, and he’s great at coming up with unique ways to describe things happening on the floor. In one broadcast a couple of years ago, instead of just saying “that was some really great passing by the Thunderbirds”, he said something like “Hey Google, show me an amazing passing play”. My Google Nest in the next room tried to answer him, though it misunderstood the question.

This past weekend, he was calling the Oshawa/Halifax game and made a couple of great comments like that. He described one defender (I forget who) as being “tougher than a two dollar steak” which made me laugh. Then in the late stages of the third quarter, with the score quite a ways in the Thunderbirds’ favour, something happened against Oshawa – I forget the details but Oshawa somehow wasted a scoring opportunity. Pat was trying to say that although it’s not even the fourth quarter, the Oshawa offense really needs to start converting on those opportunities or they’re going to run out of time. What he said was “It’s starting to get late early”, which makes both no sense at all and perfect sense at the same time.

The Anything Lax Show

I spoke with Jake McDonald from the Anything Lax show last week, and that interview is up on Spotify and YouTube now. It was a good long talk, and we talked about my history as an NLL fan and writer as well as a lot about the 2026 NLL season including the Rock, goalie and rookie of the year predictions, other predictions on who might have great seasons, and lots more. The Anything Lax show is a new podcast this year (this was only episode 17), and Jake is all over social media as well. But he’s clearly not new to either the game or the media side of things. He asked some really good questions that made me think. Go check out the interview and one of the newest NLL podcasts!

Calgary’s comeback

Expectations for the Roughnecks are not very high this season. I’m on record saying that I think they won’t be terrible but I’m not sure they’re making the playoffs either. And since I missed half of their game on Saturday including the big comeback (see the Not Awesome section), I don’t have much to say about it but I wanted to at least acknowledge it. Calgary were down by a couple of goals early, and gradually fell deeper and deeper behind the Rush, though they were only down by five at the half. But they outscored the Rush 3–1 in the third quarter, bringing the Rush’s lead down to three, and then scored four straight in under four minutes in the fourth quarter to tie the game. Zach Manns scored only a minute and a half later and the Rush held on with two empty-net goals, but as I’ve said a million times in the past, Calgary never gave up and made this a much closer game than (a) many expected, and (b) the final score indicates.

Not Awesome

Austin Staats

I didn’t really know where to list this. This particular piece is just news, but the whole situation is certainly Not Awesome so that’s why I put it here. I’m on record with my opinions about the Staats situation, so I won’t go into great detail about that, but in a nutshell, I think Austin Staats should be out of the NLL for good. A week or two ago, the league ended his indefinite suspension (from the end of the 2024 season) and reinstated him, meaning he could appear in games once again if San Diego were to move him to the active roster. I’m not sure exactly what led to this move, unless they feel that he’s been rehabilitated enough and deserves to play. Then this past Tuesday, the Seals announced that they had “relinquished the rights” to Austin Staats, a phrase I haven’t heard NLL teams use in the past. I believe it means he was released and is now free to sign anywhere.

Nobody picked him up, but then the league announced on Saturday, four days later, that Staats was being placed on “investigative leave”, so now he can’t play again until further notice. The announcement said that he was placed on leave “while [the league] determines whether Staats committed a violation of League rules in connection with off-floor conduct.” Are they saying that something has happened to cause this in the last two weeks, i.e. since he’s been reinstated? I certainly haven’t heard anything about such an event, though it might have been kept out of the press.

It seems odd that the league would suspend him indefinitely because of off-floor issues, leave him suspended for a year and a half, then reinstate him (although my understanding is that his legal issues are still ongoing), and then just two weeks later, suspend him indefinitely again.

Thomas Hoggarth injury

Thomas Hoggarth left Friday’s game early with some kind of lower body injury. Nobody hit him and he didn’t land badly from a crease dive or anything, I’m not sure what happened. He basically dropped in a heap and had to be helped off the floor, putting very little weight on one leg. He didn’t return to the game, and I believe I remember the announcer saying that he was standing with a crutch watching the rest of the game. It’s good that he didn’t have to go straight to the hospital, but the crutch isn’t a good sign. I hate to see significant injuries like that, especially in game one of the season, so hopefully it looked worse than it was and Hoggarth returns to the lineup very soon.

Thomas Hoggarth

Sloppy play by Oshawa

As I mentioned above, Oshawa’s offense really didn’t have a great game on Friday night. There were missed and dropped passes, and shots that missed the net by two feet.* Some sets were just sloppy; there was one sequence in the second quarter where the FireWolves had about 5 missed passes in about 20 seconds. Somehow they managed to keep possession until the last one but never had time to get a shot off because they were too busy retrieving the ball.

They weren’t particularly disciplined either, nor were the Thunderbirds. Each team took eight minors, but in the third quarter, Oshawa took penalties on two straight power plays, not only killing their own power play but giving Halifax a short power play of their own after their penalty expired. The FireWolves took the wind out of their own sails twice in about four minutes.

Honestly, Halifax wasn’t much better. I wrote last week that the Oshawa/Toronto game looked like a mid-season game for both teams, but that certainly wasn’t the case here.

* – There was one shot by Dyson Williams that missed the net by quite a bit but bounced off the back boards directly to another FireWolves player who took a shot (which Hill stopped). I watched Dyson’s father make that same intentional off-the-boards pass to John Tavares or John Grant, Jr. too many times to believe Dyson just missed the net and got a lucky bounce.

NLL+ drops the CAL @ SSK game

Once the game hit halftime, NLL+ showed a brief interview with Austin Shanks, several minutes of nothing, and then a few minutes of first-half analysis from broadcasters Cody Janzen and John Fraser. Then I got a test pattern with a very loud continuous BEEEEEP for several minutes, then some shots of pre-game action; a few people were on the floor but the stands were completely empty and they were displaying a score bug reading 0–0 and a countdown timer. After a few minutes of that, I noticed on Twitter that the second half was starting, so I tried to refresh the page. I found that the game was listed in the “Replays” category, and the “Live / Upcoming” category only listed next weekend’s games. It wasn’t until there were about five minutes left in the fourth quarter before the live stream of the game re-appeared on the NLL+ page, so thankfully we were able to see the end of the game.

The full game replay available on NLL+ now is the full game, not just the first half plus last five minutes, so it must have just been the streaming that was broken.

Maybe the problem was something simple like someone clicking the “End broadcast” button instead of something else, and once the feed stopped, it couldn’t easily be restarted. Maybe it was something technical that had no “human error” component. I have no way to know. But hopefully the NLL+ tech department is looking into how they could have avoided or solved this problem. Regardless of what caused it, it was not awesome.

Attendance in Saskatchewan

I wrote about this enough times last year that I’ll keep it short here. Attendance of 6,183 to a Saskatchewan Rush home opener six months after they challenged the Bandits for the NLL Championship is terrible. The Rush have had 89 home games in Saskatchewan and only seven of them had lower attendance, all last season (including two of their three playoff games). But expectations for last season weren’t great; the fact that they went to the finals was a bit of a surprise. This year, expectations are much higher and they still can’t get people out to games. Maybe rent at the SaskTel Centre is low enough that they don’t need to bring in ten thousand fans to break even, so maybe moving because they’re losing tons of money isn’t an issue. But average home attendance for the Rush has dropped every single year since 2017. It would be ironic if the UnBoxed game in Edmonton helps bump interest there and the Rush head back to Edmonton because of lack of interest in Saskatoon.