We are officially at the halfway point of the season, as every team has now played at least nine games. The Rush are now tied for the fourth-longest single-season winning streak at eight games, the Mammoth are right behind them with a seven-game streak, and the Swarm have won five in a row. At the other end of the spectrum are the Knighthawks and Thunderbirds, who have each lost four straight, and the FireWolves with a five-game losing streak.

Lots of Awesomes and only a couple of Not Awesomes this week, so let’s get to it.

Awesome

Maki Jenner… again

A little over a year ago, Maki Jenner became the first woman to do colour commentary on an NLL TV broadcast, and many of us knew she wasn’t going to stop there. On Saturday night, Maki became the first woman to do play-by-play on an NLL broadcast, and it wasn’t even an NLL+ broadcast, which would have been impressive enough. No, Maki made her PxP debut on the TSN game of the week. Obviously this is huge for the league, and great for those of us who enjoy hearing Maki’s enthusiasm, excitement, and knowledge of lacrosse. But I’m sure Maki, like so many other Canadian sports fans, grew up watching games on TSN and so to be able to do a TSN broadcast and say the immortal line “You’re watching the NLL on TSN” a few times must have been incredible for her.

I think I only saw a few negative “I’m not watching because there’s a GIRL talking” comments, but the existence of such comments just confirms the importance of celebrating Maki’s achievements, and the achievements of all women in the lacrosse broadcasting world. I said this last year but it bears repeating:

There are girls and young women out there who aspire to be broadcasters, and watching this broadcast will make them realize that being a lacrosse broadcaster at the pro level is now a possibility for them. Hearing a woman doing colour or play-by-play on an NLL broadcast should not be a big deal, and at some point it won’t be. But for now it is, so congrats to Maki on being a groundbreaker yet again.

Maki Jenner and Pat Gregoire

Tehoka Nanticoke goal

Late in the first quarter, a Buffalo player takes a shot on net, which was stopped by Warren Hill. With the ball loose in the crease, Nanticoke parked himself on the edge, reached out and picked up the ball with one arm at full extension (while staying out of the crease), then dove to his right and shot it behind Warren Hill, all the while fighting off pressure from Johnny Pearson. There was a review and I wasn’t sure it was going to count but it did. Even if it turned out out that his toes were on the line, I’d have included it here because it was amazing.

Exciting conclusions

It was a great weekend for close games. Four games were won by a single goal, one of those in overtime, and another by only two. San Diego and Colorado didn’t get the memo to keep things close – or perhaps Oshawa and Toronto didn’t. On Sunday, Calgary did a good job of keeping things close for most of the game but Georgia pulled away late in the fourth.

• COL @ LV: On Friday, the Mammoth had a four goal lead with nine minutes left, but the Desert Dogs managed three in the next six minutes before Dillon Ward decided “no more” and that was as close as they got.
• BUF @ HFX: Buffalo led Halifax by as much as five until the Thunderbirds fought back and tied it with just a couple of minutes left. But Dhane Smith scored his first (!!) of the game with 2½ minutes left to give the Bandits the win.
• OTT @ ROC: Rochester led for about half of this game, but only by one or two for most of it. Ottawa tied it in the fourth and finally took the lead but the Knighthawks were never out of it.
• VAN @ SSK: An overtime game is obviously as close as you can get, and best buds Christian Del Bianco and Frank Scigliano almost matched each other exactly. Both played the full game (60:44), both faced 40 shots, but Frank made one more save.
• PHI @ CAL: You can call it the battle of the basement if you want, but if you haven’t watched it, go check out the last minute of this game on NLL+. It featured some amazing saves at both ends and as the announcers said, both teams absolutely left everything on the floor. We saw two evenly matched teams, and despite the season being barely half over, they are both fighting for their playoff lives. The game was tied seven times, and Philly broke the tie in five of those cases. But Calgary was able to do it last, which is all that matters.

Colorado Mammoth

The Mammoth this season have become what the Bandits were in the last two seasons – just an all-around excellent lacrosse team. It starts with Dillon Ward, one of the best goalies in the league and a lock for Goaltender of the Year assuming Brett Dobson falls down a well or something. The defense in front of Ward has been great, they are getting lots of transition with guys like Chaster and Rahn, and their offense has been incredible. Kew, Hannah, and Malcom (imagine thinking at the beginning of the season that Malcom would be ranked third in that list) have been the anchors but they’re also getting great secondary scoring from guys like Vela and Saris. They have a very solid offense that’s put up 15+ goals in four of their last seven games.

Just imagine how good they’d be if they had Ryan Lee and Eli McLaughlin in the lineup.

I know we still have half the season to go, but the Mammoth and the Rush have to be the front-runners for the Championship at this point. They don’t play in the regular season until April 11 – it may or may not mean anything in the standings but it’s a game I’m looking forward to.

Cam Acchione

I didn’t see much of the San Diego / Oshawa game because there were four other games going on at the same time, and when one of them is 9–1 at the half, that’s the one you tune into the least often. But it seemed that whenever I did watch more than ten seconds of that game, the name Acchione came up. He was fighting for a loose ball or running up the floor in transition but I heard his name a lot. It wasn’t until about the third time I heard his name that I thought “wait a minute, Acchione plays for Saskatchewan, not San Diego. Was there a trade I didn’t hear about?” But no, this was Cam Acchione, not his brother Matt, and Cam was making his NLL debut. His stats line was almost all zeroes (4 LB and one turnover) but that’s not always a bad thing for defenders and transition guys. Congrats to Cam on a successful debut.

Kyle Jackson

Kyle Jackson played six games with the FireWolves last year in Albany, and three games for Oshawa at the beginning of this season. He only picked up 2 points in those three games, but that’s when nobody on the FireWolves was scoring. The team averaged five goals per game over their first three. Yes, Jackson was struggling but so was everyone else. He was released by Oshawa anyway, then signed by Philadelphia a few weeks later. Jackson seems to have fit right in to the Wings offense, looking very comfortable and scoring 2+5 in his first game and 3+2 this past Saturday. I’m sure he won’t keep up that six-points-per-game pace for the rest of the season, but even if he drops to his career average of just over three points per game, that would provide some strong secondary scoring for the Wings.

Not Awesome

Gash hit on Edwards

Midway through the first quarter of the Toronto/Colorado game, Tim Edwards was racing up the floor but looking behind him to catch a pass, and then ran into a brick wall named Elijah Gash. This hit looked to me to be the effectively the same as the Hartley hit on Charbonneau a couple of weeks ago. It was at mid-floor, and Gash isn’t a goalie, so a couple of things were different but the idea was the same – Edwards could not possibly have seen the hit coming and thus it was dangerous.

But Hartley was given a match penalty and booted from the game, while Gash’s major penalty was reduced to a minor.

We have to consider the possibility that it was not as blatant as it appeared. Say Gash saw Edwards coming and decided to stop him from proceeding any further. That’s his job, and he’s good at it. (Note that this is not Hartley’s job.) But perhaps Gash misjudged Edwards’s position and speed, as well as his own speed, and thus hitting Edwards before he was ready for it was unavoidable. Is Gash supposed to dive out of the way in order to avoid hitting him, or start running backwards to lessen the impact or allow Edwards time to turn around? No, nobody’s expecting that. I haven’t seen any video of Gash before the hit, so I don’t know if his forward movement was a result of a single step or if he ran several steps to make the hit.

The Mammoth announcers kept talking about where Gash’s shoulder hit Edwards (square in the chest) and the fact that it wasn’t a “head-hunting” hit, which was true. It did look like he made an effort to crouch a bit to avoid head contact – when you’re 6’4" you have to think about that, and Gash did. But in my opinion, where Gash hit him wasn’t really the point, it was the fact that Edwards was blindsided and so this was no less dangerous than Hartley’s hit.

But in the end, I am surprised Gash got off so lightly considering how similar a hit it was to Hartley’s and only a couple of weeks later. I really hope this doesn’t send the message that such blindside hits are acceptable in the NLL because then it’s only a matter of time before another career is ended. Or worse.

NLL+ Multi-View

Multi-view was a great feature on NLL+ last season and I used it all the time. It was a sort of windowing system where you could watch all the games at once. You’d focus on one of them and hear the sound from that one, but you could switch which one you were focusing on any time. It was awesome, and this season it’s gone. I’m amazed it took me this long to realize it wasn’t there because I loved it last year.