As of week 6, every team has won at least one and lost at least one. Four teams are at .500, five are above, and five are below. The top four teams were in the top five last year, and three of the bottom four were in the bottom four last year. So not much has changed, right? No, it doesn’t feel like that at all, actually.

Awesome

Calgary

In a post-game interview last week, Calgary head coach Josh Sanderson was clearly angry about their loss to the Bandits. He said they just weren’t ready to play. To his credit he blamed himself as much as his players, saying he’s the one that has to get them ready and he didn’t. (Compare that to Colorado head coach Pat Coyle who threw his players entirely under the bus, saying that their struggles were a personnel problem.) This week, the Roughnecks came ready to play, which resulted in their first win of the season.

Tanner Cook

Aden Walsh faced 59 shots (the most of his career) and saved over 81% of them, Tanner Cook set personal bests in assists (7) and points (10) in a game, Brayden Mayea set or tied personal bests in goals (3), assists (6), and points (9), Noah Manning set personal bests in assists (3) and points (5), and Harrison Matsuoka set personal bests in assists (2) and points (3). Not to take anything away from Tyler Pace, who scored two and helped on five more, but they just weren’t personal bests – he’s been in that range many times before.

We also need to give credit to San Diego, who were down by five in the second, and by four several times in the second and third but came back with four goals in 1:44 to tie it. Those were the fastest four goals in any game this season. They never managed to take the lead and ended up losing the game, but they weren’t really out of it until very late in the fourth.

Jack Hannah and the Mammoth

I mentioned above that Pat Coyle blamed his personnel for their humiliating 12–3 loss last week. Well, even if it wasn’t great to take no responsibility yourself as the head coach, perhaps he wasn’t wrong. One change of personnel made quite a big difference; newly acquired Jack Hannah scored two and added six helpers, Will Malcom had 4+5, and Ryan Lee had 2+5 as the Mammoth scored 18 goals for the first time in over a year (19 against Halifax in December 2024). The Mammoth defence couldn’t stop Fields (2+6), Lanchbury (4+3), McConvey (3+3) or Smith (2+5), but then again, not many defences can. They did manage to contain former teammate Zed Williams to a single goal and no assists.

A team going from scoring 3 one week to scoring 18 the next week is quite the turnaround. So is moving from last week’s Not Awesome list to this week’s Awesome list, and the Mammoth did both.

Offense in Ontario

The two O??awa teams played each other last weekend in what was probably a nightmare for the announcers. Oshawa has been struggling mightily with their offense this season but managed to bust out of that slump with 14 goals, including six from Alex Simmons and four from Dyson Williams. But they couldn’t stop the Ottawa offense from scoring 16. The Bears featured four different players with five points and one (you’ll never guess who) with ten. Only three times in the entire game did we go five minutes or more without a goal being scored, and twenty of the thirty goals were scored less than two minutes after the previous one.

Las Vegas

In past years, if the Desert Dogs were down 14–7 to the reigning champs early in the fourth quarter, that was pretty much game over. But on Saturday, against the three-time champion Bandits, the Dogs refused to give up. Five straight goals over about six minutes (all by former Bandits Chris Cloutier and Mitch Jones) got the Desert Dogs back within two with four minutes to go. Dhane Smith scored an insurance goal to put the Bandits up by three again, but only 35 seconds later, Josh Jackson scored his first of the season to cut the lead back down to two. That was as close as they would get, but Vegas deserves huge props for that late-game effort.

Attendance

I’m always moaning and complaining about attendance, so let’s give positive credit where it’s due.

• Sellout in Buffalo. 19,070 people in the building is just so commonplace for the Bandits now that we look at that and nonchalantly think “Yeah, that’s great, whatever”. But it really is remarkable and it shouldn’t be considered any less remarkable just because it happens a lot.
• 5,965 doesn’t sound like much in Oshawa, but that beat their opening night attendance number. For a 1–3 team struggling to score goals, that’s really great.
• 9,675 in San Diego is over two thousand more than the attendance at their last home game, and is the second-highest attended game in San Diego history. Awesome.

Not Awesome

Halifax offense

The Thunderbirds have only scored more than ten goals once this season, and are tied with Georgia for second-last in the league with only 9 goals per game. Granted they’ve played the Bandits once and the Rush twice, last year’s Championship finalists and both having excellent goaltending and defense. But their next five games are against Higgins, Jamieson, Ward, Dobson, and then Matt Vinc again. This is the whole “if you want to be the best, you have to beat the best” thing, and “Yeah, but they have a great goaltender” just isn’t a good enough excuse.