There was so much awesome this week that I cut down on the commentary for each entry a little bit. Otherwise this article would be five times as long as my normal articles.

Awesome

Cameron Dunkerley

I read online on Friday afternoon that Origlieri wouldn’t be able to play Friday night and that Dunkerley would be starting. I don’t remember how it was phrased but the implication was that the Rock were given a gift. I suppose that’s fair – if your star starting goalie can’t play and the backup needs to take over, the assumption is that he’s not quite as good as the starter, or he’d be the starter. Even the Seals announcers implied that Dunkerley would have to play amazing for the Seals to have any chance to win this game. Well, he did. He clearly found everyone’s lack of faith disturbing, and went out and played an excellent game. Yes, the Seals lost but that had nothing to do with Dunkerley.

Will MacLeod

Will MacLeod made his NLL debut with the Thunderbirds on Friday night, scoring four goals and adding two assists. I think that having such a successful debut is a bit more common in the NLL than in other pro leagues because of the summer leagues which are filled with NLL players. Even so, 4+2 in your NLL debut is still pretty amazing.

Warren Hill on Friday

Warren Hill’s values on Friday’s scoresheet don’t raise your eyebrows that much – 47 saves and an 81% save percentage on 11 goals allowed is very good, but not incredible. But if you watch the game, a lot of those 47 saves were incredible. Hellyer, Teat, Kearnan, and O’Connor (8 points!) all played strong games on Friday but Hill was just a bit better.

He didn’t have quite the same success on Saturday night but very few Halifax players did.

Rochester offense

Maybe I should be listing the Philly defense as Not Awesome, since giving up 78 shots is certainly not awesome. This is so many shots that both Damude (40 minutes) and Knott (20 minutes) had save percentages over 80% and they still gave up a combined 15 goals (plus one empty-netter). Rochester only managed two goals in the first quarter, and were down by four at one point. But they outscored Philly 14–8 over the rest of the game. For the second straight game, Zed Williams was held to a single goal but Fields (3+6), Lanchbury (2+5), McConvey (3+1) and Smith (2+1) plus 3 assists from Waters and two transition goals from Gilray powered the Knighthawks to victory.

Thomas McConvey

On Saturday, this continued with each of the top four having 3+ points including 7 from McConvey, but Zed Williams had his best game of the season, scoring three and adding two helpers. And this was done against Matt freakin’ Vinc. Amazingly, 28 goals in two games actually brought their goals-per-game average down, since they were sitting at 14.3 last week and are only at 14.2 now.

Michael Sowers

When Sowers, a PLL superstar, signed with the Wings in 2025, it was huge news in the lacrosse world. He only played a bit last year, picking up seven points (4+3) in five games. There were times where he looked really good and others where he looked a bit lost. He started this season injured, so if you’re like me and you follow the PLL a little but you’re not a die-hard, it may have been easy to forget just how good he really is. On Friday night, he repeated almost his entire 2025 season (4+1) in the first half, adding the remaining two assists in the second half. If he’s really figured out the box game the way he’s dominated the field game, and he’s got Brennan O’Neill next to him, look out for the Wings.

Aden Walsh and Calgary

Before the season started, Vancouver was generally considered a top-level team (and still is), but Calgary wasn’t supposed to be very good. But the Roughnecks either didn’t listen or didn’t care. Despite their 1–4 start, they have been better than expected, and Walsh had an outstanding game on Friday. The OT winner was Vancouver’s first goal in over 20 minutes, and Calgary scored five in that span to tie the game and send it to OT. Walsh kept up with Christian Del Bianco the entire game, facing just one more shot and allowing just one more goal. Dane Dobbie’s old friend Curtis Dickson ruined Dane Dobbie night in Calgary by breaking the Warriors drought in overtime, but don’t let that take anything away from Calgary’s performance.

CJ Kirst

Kirst continues to fit very well into the Rock offense. His five goals on Friday gives him 12 for the season, double anyone else on the Rock, and putting him on pace for a rookie record 54 goals on the season. Yes, it’s still a bit early for such predictions but it’s still impressive. He came into the season as a big-name rookie, but it was still a question of how he’d fit into the offense anchored by Matthews, Boushy, and Dawick. It may not be long until we’re hoping those three can fit into the offence anchored by Kirst and Hiltz.

Trevor Baptiste

There have been eight games where a player took at least 10 faceoffs in a game and won all of them. Trevor Baptiste has done it four times now. Yes, the Seals lost and no, he wasn’t facing TD Ierlan, but it’s still an amazing accomplishment. Geoff Snider did it twice and Jake Withers has done it twice, if you’re wondering who the others are. But in most of those games, the player didn’t take all of his team’s faceoffs.

Trevor Baptiste is the only player to have taken all of his team’s faceoffs in a game and won them all. And he’s done it three times over his career, including Friday.

Tre Leclaire’s backhand goal

LeClaire came out of the corner with the ball but had a Rock defender all over him so he had no shot at the net. But he shot at the net anyway, throwing a beautiful no-look switched-hands backhand shovel shot that Rose had no chance of stopping because he couldn’t possibly have known it was coming. Just an amazing goal.

Ryan Keenan and the Rush offense

The Rush captain was on fire on Friday night. Ryan Keenan set career highs in goals (6), points (12), power play goals (2), and loose balls (13) to lead his team to a huge 21–15 victory over the Desert Dogs. We can’t neglect to mention the other scorers on the Rush though – Church had 3+7, Manns 4+5, Shanks 4+4, and Haley 2+4, plus Zawada and Messenger each scored, as the Rush became the first team to break the 20 goal barrier this season.

Over the last three seasons, there have been six games where a team broke 20 goals, and Las Vegas was on the receiving end of five of them. Ouch.

Ryan Keenan on Batman night, cosplaying as Two-Face

John Gurtler interview

During halftime of the Buffalo / Rochester game, John Gurtler interviewed me for the Bandits radio show. John is a big fan of my NLLStats.com web site, and has interviewed me about it at least twice now. We talked a bit about the Bandits game, and also about the “big 4” guys in the Knighthawks offense, but mostly about the web site. Thanks John for all the coverage and letting your listeners know about the site!

Oshawa offense

After their first few games, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d never see “Oshawa offense” in the Awesome list. They scored 32 goals in their first four games, an average of 7.75 goals per game. The lowest in the history of the league is 8.50, by the Charlotte Cobras from their only (winless) season in 1996, and you do not want your team to be compared to the Cobras in pretty much any way, though their logo was pretty cool. But over the holidays, the FireWolves must have remembered that they have some pretty great offensive players including Ty Kurtz with 7 goals on his birthday, and Ethan Walker and Alex Simmons with 9 points each. They’ve scored 30 goals over their last two games, almost doubling their output from the first four. They’re currently tied with Charlotte at 8.50 goals per game, but definitely heading in the right direction.

Attendance

Saturday’s game in Rochester had 8,546 people show up, the highest attendance in Rochester Knighthawks (2.0) history. Yes, there were lots of Buffalo fans who made the drive but that’s always true – four of the top five games in the history of these Knighthawks, and seven of the top ten in the history of the old Knighthawks, were games against the Bandits.

There have only been four home games in Oshawa, but Saturday’s game set the new record for the FireWolves – attendance was 5,971, only six more people than a week ago, but setting attendance records (at the high end of the scale) is still awesome. And while there were probably a few Halifax fans in the crowd, I suspect very few people made the trip from Nova Scotia for that one.

Of the six other games this past weekend, only one had more than 6,000 people, and San Diego’s attendance dropped by half over the previous week. But I said I wouldn’t be talking negative about attendance anymore so we’ll just move on.

Goaltending in Georgia

One player in this game had more than one goal. In fact, only one player on each team had as many as three points. Meanwhile, Brett Dobson became the first goalie in league history to allow six goals and have a save percentage over 89% and still lose. Dillon Ward only allowed five and had a slightly lower save percentage, but 88.6% is still pretty incredible. Dobson just faced an extra 12 shots. It’s heartbreaking to see those kinds of numbers with an L next to them. It was an amazing goaltender battle, but someone has to lose.

Not Awesome

Ryan Lee out for the year

After missing most of 2023 and all of 2024, Ryan Lee was back in 2025 and while he didn’t reproduce his 119-point season from 2022, he still finished with 95 points on a team that didn’t make the playoffs. But now after only four games in 2026, Lee was put on the season-ending IR last week. Dealing with injuries is one of the most heartbreaking parts of sports and while some players manage to avoid them for long periods, very few can go their whole career without them. But it does seem that some players are unfairly targeted by the lacrosse injury gods. Maybe after this, those gods will finally see that Lee has suffered enough and leave him alone.

Halifax penalties

Halifax is leading the league in penalty minutes right now, and it’s not even close. They have 160 PIMs in 6 games. If you doubled every other team’s penalty minutes so far this season, the Thunderbirds would still be in second place overall. Now, more than half of those penalty minutes came in the Oshawa game last weekend, and the majority of those came with less than three minutes left in the fourth quarter of a game they lost by seven. That’s not to excuse anything, but it does imply that this game was an outlier. They won’t finish the season with double the penalty minutes of everyone else.

That said, many broadcasters, journalists, and podcasters have all talked about it recently, and many fans know that taking unnecessary penalties has been a big problem for the T-Birds for a while. It really needs to get cleaned up if they want to make waves in the post-season. You cannot be successful long-term if you spend half of every game on the PK.

Defense in Las Vegas

The goalie numbers in this one were dismal. Frank Scigliano allowed 15 goals and saved 68.8% of shots he faced. And he won. The Las Vegas goaltenders were no better – Landon Kells allowed 13 goals in 44 minutes, though his save percentage was a slightly less crappy 71.1%. Caleb Khan’s NLL debut wasn’t as impressive as he might have liked: eight goals allowed in 15 minutes, and a save percentage of only 52.9%. The Rush offense was on fire, scoring 21, but Frank can’t be too happy with his performance in that game. Las Vegas had a strong offensive game as well, and we knew that offense wasn’t likely to be the problem in Vegas this year but in each of their last three games, they’ve given up more goals than the previous one. Sometimes you can score your way out of defensive problems, but that’s a short term thing, not a season-long strategy.