I would guess that nobody is shocked at most of the game results this week, other than maybe the game in Banditland (which I guess was more unexpected than shocking). The Warriors beating the Knighthawks isn’t shocking (they did it last week too), but the final score was a bit surprising. The Rock and Swarm took early leads and won, the Seals and Roughnecks took early leads and lost. As always, there were a few things that were awesome, and a few that weren’t.

Awesome

Stats guys

If you’re reading this, you know I’m a stats guy. I used to write stats articles all the time, but these days any extra time I have after writing my weekly reports tends to get devoted to nllstats.com. Thus I don’t write about stats all that often anymore but if you like that sort of thing, here are a couple of people who do.

Paul Tutka writes about all kinds of lacrosse stuff at The Lax Mag. He has a weekly column called Clutch Kings, which is based on the Money Ballers column that he created at IL Indoor many years ago. He also ranks players and teams and does analysis on various stats. He even talks about other lacrosse leagues like the WLA and MSL, tournaments like the Mann and Minto Cups, and even junior lacrosse. Someone once described me as “the OG of NLL stats writers” but Paul was doing it years before I started.

Ty Merrow writes at TyMer Lacrosse. He’s not that active on Twitter/X anymore but is on BSky. Ty is based in Georgia and writes game reports for Georgia Swarm games including summaries and interviews. In addition to that, every week he picks a team or a stat or a player or some combination thereof, tells you what you probably think about it (more often than not, I think “yeah, that’s about right”), and then he tells you why you’re wrong. Even better, he uses both his strong knowledge of lacrosse along with both basic stats and advanced metrics to prove why you’re wrong. Ty watches every game in great detail and records his own stats, and as a result he has far more detailed stats that I ever had access to. Most of it is not stuff that’s available on NLLStats.com because it requires such time-consuming work. If you want to know how many goals or loose balls or penalty minutes per game your team is getting, NLLStats.com is for you. But if you want to know your team’s shorthanded shot on goal percentage, or how often your team gets a power play opportunity but fails to register a shot, talk to Ty.

Full disclosure: Paul created and wrote The Money Ballers column at IL Indoor for years. When he left IL in 2012, I took over that column and continued it until the 2018 season. I have never met Paul or Ty though I have conversed with them online.

Rock and FireWolves

I’m going to give an Awesome to both the Rock and the FireWolves for Saturday night’s game. The Rock get theirs for, obviously, winning the game. They also had their offense working very well again, spreading the points around so that nine different players had at least two points. Defense was solid and Troy Holowchuk played an excellent game, keeping Oshawa scoreless for the first 21 minutes of the game, and keeping them to only five goals in the first three quarters. There was a four minute stretch in the fourth quarter where Oshawa scored four goals, but then Holowchuk returned to form and stopped a number of good scoring opportunities in the last few minutes of the game. He even had a chance to fire a shot on the far empty net, and it looked like he was going to do it but thought better of it.

Troy Holowchuk

Oshawa gets their Awesome for stepping up their play in the fourth quarter and making a game of it. They were down by six midway through the third quarter and again early in the fourth, but then Dyson Williams scored, Dawson Theede scored a natural hat-trick in under two minutes, and Tye Kurtz scored two minutes after that to cut the lead to one. Not one Rock fan in that building was comfortable with the one goal lead at that point and after a few more minutes, Challen Rogers gave them some insurance, scoring on the empty net with 44 seconds left.

The FireWolves were never out of that game, despite the six-goal deficits. Three times the Rock scored only to have the FireWolves score within about 30 seconds. Oshawa had one shot which looked like it hit the post, hit Holowchuk’s back, hit the post again, and went out. A lucky bounce here or there for the FireWolves and we were heading to overtime, or they’d have won the game outright.

Wings

A lot of people, myself included, had essentially given up on the Wings this season. Sure, the Bandits were struggling but playing the hapless Philadelphia Wings would certainly be the cure for that, right? Well, the Wings shut us all the hell up.

Newly acquired Kyle Jackson had seven points, Sowers, O’Neill, and Resetarits had five each, and Nick Damude saw 57 shots but saved over 80% of them. And it wasn’t just that they had a great game and dominated Buffalo, they didn’t. They took the lead at the end of the first, then saw it disappear in the second. That happened four more times over the second and third, and Buffalo had a two-goal lead midway through the fourth. But the Wings never gave up and scored the last four of the game while keeping Buffalo scoreless. That’s a textbook “character win”. Struggling or not, the Bandits are the defending Champions and are still a formidable team, so congrats to the Wings on their victory.

Craziness in the standings

• Las Vegas and Toronto were last and second-last respectively in the standings last year, and were a combined 10–26. They are currently both in playoff spots.
• Vegas has already matched their win total from last season and they’re not even halfway through their schedule. One more win will tie the franchise record.
• Buffalo has been 13–5 or better four times in the last six seasons, and have been in six of the last eight Championship series, winning the last three. They are currently 3–5, have lost four straight, and are out of a playoff position.
• The Wings are 2–6 but have beaten both the Bandits and the Mammoth.
• Many thought the Knighthawks would be right up at the top of the standings, but they are 4–4. Their wins have come against teams not currently in the playoff picture, and their losses have all come against teams currently in the top five. You know what they say: “if you want to be the best, you have to beat the best” and the Knighthawks, so far, have not.
• The Mammoth are still without Eli McLaughlin, and have lost Ryan Lee for the season. They are also down Connor Robinson, Connor Kelly, and Zed Williams from last year. But Andrew Kew and Jack Hannah seem to be making up for all of those losses and they’ve gone from 9th to tied for second.

Of course, the season is not even half over (only four teams have played at least nine games) and a lot could change between now and the playoffs. Nine teams are currently on a 3-or-more-game winning or losing streak. Just about any one of those teams having a 3- or 4-game streak in the other direction would dramatically change the playoff picture.

Not Awesome

Gash / Clark fight

Emerson Clark was signed by the FireWolves earlier this week, and everyone knew what that meant. I’m sure he’s a decent lacrosse player (he did score a goal on Saturday) but that’s not what he’s known for. Three minutes into the first quarter, he picked a fight with Elijah Gash, probably the toughest Rock player there is (sorry Billy), and after removing his own helmet and gloves (a clear violation of rule 80.7), he walked to the middle of the floor before turning to start the actual fight. It looked to me like he wanted to make sure he was in clear view of everyone so they could all see that he was willing to fight Gash. The fight itself was no big deal; it lasted about five seconds and it looked to me like Clark missed each of his first four punches. But because Gash lost his footing and fell, Clark claimed victory. Clark and Gash both got fighting majors, and Clark also got a roughing minor. It looked to me like Clark was the instigator, so I’m not sure why he didn’t get the obligatory instigation minor and game misconduct.

On the broadcast, Teddy Jenner said that the two players agreed to do this in the warmups, so maybe that’s why the refs didn’t consider Clark the instigator. And if that is indeed the case, then Gash deserves as much blame as I’m giving Clark here. As I’ve said many times before, I don’t have a big problem with fights that start organically. But staged fights like this serve no purpose. If this is why Oshawa signed Clark then I guess he did his job, but it didn’t exactly get his team fired up at all, since they didn’t score their first goal until more than seventeen minutes later.

Bandits

The Bandits lost Chris Cloutier and Chase Fraser over the off-season, replaced them both with Ryan Benesch, and gave guys like Tehoka Nanticoke and Clay Scanlan more playing time. Benesch’s 2.8 points per game basically replaces Fraser’s 2.94. Buchanan is producing around the same level as last year, and MacKay and Nanticoke are higher than last year – their increases cover about a third of Cloutier’s 2.64. But Dhane Smith and Josh Byrne were each picking up an amazing 7.44 points per game last year, and while Dhane is down to 6.88 (still on pace for 123 points), Byrne is only at 5.38 points per game. He’s on pace for 96 points, a drop of 38 points from last year. I’ve seen a couple of broadcasts this year where it’s mentioned that Byrne just looks… off, like something is slightly wrong. Maybe he’s hurt, maybe something else is going on but that’s too big a drop in production to be “just one of those things”.

I don’t think this is the same game

Matt Vinc has a save percentage of 75.6%, his lowest since the 2012 season (when he won the Championship with the Knighthawks), and a GAA of 11.40, his highest since 2016 (Knighthawks missed the playoffs that year). These aren’t terrible numbers in general, but they’re not very Vinc-like. One is forced to wonder if Father Time has finally caught up with the GOAT.

There isn’t any one single thing you can point to and say “That is the problem with the Bandits”, or Steve Dietrich and John Tavares would have fixed it by now. But I’ve seen Bandits fans online wondering what they could get in trades for Smith or Byrne, and I think that’s a bit premature. They’re not currently in a playoff position, but that could change in a couple of games. And if there’s any team that’s full of players who know what it takes to win in the NLL playoffs, it’s the Bandits.

Pregame fight

Nobody would have been surprised at a fight in this game but a fight in the pregame warmups? That I’m not sure I’ve ever seen. However, if that was the total held-over reaction from the Hartley hit on Steph Charbonneau last week, then I’d have been happy with that. Get that all out of the way and move on, focusing on this game. And that’s basically what happened.

The reason this gets a Not Awesome is because there was a team of very young kids on the floor at the same time. If they were at the other end of the floor, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal, but they were right there when the fight started, close enough that some of the non-fighting players had to push them back to make sure they didn’t get hurt. Adam Levi posted this picture showing how close one of the kids was to getting hit. If you’re going to start throwing punches in a non-game situation, you need to be more aware of what’s going on around you.

Goalies in Vancouver

Two of the top goaltenders in the NLL gave up a total of 31 goals on Saturday night. Hartley had a save percentage under 60%, and Del Bianco’s was 70%. Del Bianco hasn’t had a save percentage of 70% or less in any game since December 30, 2022, when he had save percentage of 66.7% in a 17–14 Calgary loss to San Diego. Hartley didn’t even play half the game and had a GAA over 25. Clearly both offences were firing on all cylinders but it’s pretty rare that you’d see either of these goaltenders have numbers like that, let alone both of them in the same game.

Riley Hutchcraft did a decent job, with a GAA under 9.00 and a save percentage of 73.7%, and he’s the one who got the loss.

As a bit of an aside, why was Hartley allowed to appeal his suspension? He got a match penalty, which comes with an automatic one- or two-game suspension. He was given the minimum. Given that a suspension is mandatory because of the penalty, why appeal? Or was it a tactic so that he could play in the game against Vancouver and miss a different game later?