Only four games this week but a lot of awesome to throw around. The Knighthawks and Wings remembered how to score goals but nobody else did. We had one game with 11 goals and one with 14. Another had 19, which is still pretty low, but each team had a 25+ minute scoring drought. We have a few Awesomes, a few Not Awesomes, and one that was kind of both and neither.

Awesome

Oshawa fans

I listed Oshawa under Not Awesome last week because of their low attendance. Update: No I didn’t, I listed Ottawa under Not Awesome last week. It took me four weeks before I got those two teams confused, and I’m a bit surprised I lasted that long.

Anyway, Oshawa gathered over 2,300 bears during the teddy bear toss on Friday night, and that’s with a reported attendance of about 4,200. That means that on average, over half of the people there threw a teddy bear on the floor. That’s awesome. Ashley Docking also mentioned during the broadcast that the team store is mostly sold out of merch.

The team didn’t play that badly, but Christian Del Bianco was on fire so the fans didn’t get to see a win. But I’m big on giving props where they’re due, thus the format of my weekly reports – I’m not above giving Awesomes to teams that lose or Not Awesomes to teams that win (see below).

There may not be as many FireWolves fans at their games than some other teams, but they are buying the merch and bringing the teddies, so kudos to them.

Knighthawks offense

On Saturday night, reigning MVP Connor Fields had the first double-digit game of the season with 11 points, Lanchbury had seven assists, Jake Piseno picked up his first NLL hat-trick, and Zed Williams got his first goal in a Knighthawks jersey. Fields is fourth and Lanchbury fifth in points overall. Fields is first in goals and Lanchbury tied for first in assists. The Knighthawks have scored 30 goals in two games – the only teams with more goals have played three games. In fact, all other teams that have 24 or more goals have played three games. No, they won’t average 15 goals per game for the rest of the season but we know the Knighthawks are an offensive powerhouse who also have a team GAA under 10 and the second-best save percentage (84.1%) in the league. Early days still but Rochester is looking pretty dominant.

Defense in Saskatchewan

Brett Dobson allowed six goals and had a save percentage of 86% and lost. Frank Scigliano allowed four goals and had a save percentage of 89.7%. Eleven goals in a game tied an NLL regular-season record for fewest goals in a game. Those are some pretty incredible numbers and the goaltenders were definitely strong in this one, but I might credit each defence as a whole even more. Both offensive units seemed frustrated that they weren’t getting good looks, and shot clocks were running out a lot. The Rush offense was getting swarmed all night, if you’ll pardon the pun, but it was happening a lot at the other end as well. In the odd case where an offensive player managed to get through the D and get a shot away, the goalies were almost always there to bail out his team. If you’re a big fan of the goal-fests where scoring is plentiful, you might want to skip the replay of this one. But if you like defensive lacrosse, this is the game for you.

Neither

Scoring is down

It’s still very early in the season, but after 17 games the average number of goals in an NLL game this season is 19.47. That’s the lowest average for any season in history by more than two full goals – the previous record-holder was the COVID-shortened 2020 season at 21.72. The lowest for a full season was 21.94 in 2011. I don’t expect that trend to continue – eventually we’ll regress to the mean and scoring will increase again, but for now, you should be betting the under.

We’ve seen some great goaltending performances (Awesome), but we’ve also seen some pretty dismal offensive games (Not Awesome), so that’s why this is listed under Neither.

Not Awesome

Las Vegas

There were lots of positives in Las Vegas’s victory on Saturday. Mitch Jones, Donville, Cloutier, Fraser in his Desert Dogs debut, Kells all played well, Hamer-Jackson got the better of Jay Thorimbert at the face-off dot, and they got their first win of the season, so kudos to them for all of that. But they are listed under Not Awesome for a reason.

Las Vegas scored one goal in the last 33 minutes of the game, and after taking a 9–1 lead, they allowed Ottawa to score eight straight to tie it up. They still managed to win but I’d guess that the post-game message from Shawn Williams to his team was less “yay, we won! Good job, boys” and more “we had an eight-goal lead and blew it. That can’t happen.”

Lyle Thompson

What is up with Lyle? One of the most consistent scorers and playmakers of the last decade has a single goal and five assists in three games. This is a guy who’s averaged 5.19 points per game over his ten year career, including four 100+ point seasons. He’s finished one season with a points/game average under 4.7, and that was his rookie year with 3.33. Now he’s on a two-points-per-game pace?

Again, early days. Just like scoring overall, I can’t imagine this trend continuing much longer. Thompson is just too good a player. But if it does, we have to wonder if there’s some kind of injury lingering. He played in game seven of the Mann Cup in September and no injury was reported then.

Attendance in Saskatchewan

Congratulations to the Saskatchewan Rush for setting a new franchise record. Saturday’s game was the lowest-attended game in Rush history – including the years in Edmonton. Only 4,657 showed up for that one, while the lowest-attended game in Edmonton was 5,257 in January 2015.

My smokin’ hot take (more of a prediction than a hot take, really) of the week, posted on Twitter on Sunday morning, is this: The Rush will win the NLL Championship this year, and then announce that they are relocating to Edmonton. For those of you who weren’t following the NLL back in 2015, this is exactly what happened but the other way around. The Edmonton Rush won the NLL Championship on June 5, 2015 and announced that they were relocating to Saskatchewan about six weeks later on July 20.

I’ve also decided that this will be the last “Attendance in <city>” Not Awesome I’m going to give this season, unless something really crazy happens (if a Bandits home game pulls in 8k or something, I’ll make an exception). It’s just too common and too frustrating. Or maybe I’ll have a “Bad attendance” entry every week and just list the teams that have crappy attendance that week.

Goalie fights

Sure, they can be fun to watch, mostly because they’re so unusual (there have been two since 2012, both involving Rylan Hartley), but here’s my second hot take of the week: goalie fights are ridiculous.

I’ve talked about my dislike for fighting in lacrosse many times. I get that sometimes emotions run high and a player might perceive another player’s action as a cheap shot, and some minor pushing and shoving turns into a full-blown fight. Those “organic” sorts of fights don’t bother me. Let ’em fight, give ’em five each, and move on. Are they a necessary part of the game? Not in my opinion, but I can see an argument the other way.

But “scheduled” fights are ridiculous. Fights that everyone knows are coming because of something that happened weeks ago are ridiculous. Fights done just to “shake things up” are ridiculous. And fights where one of the participants has to run the entire length of the floor, or both have to run half the length of the floor, then then take off half of their equipment in order to fight the only other person on the floor they’re “allowed” to fight are ridiculous.