What an incredible weekend of games. Keegan Bal and the Warriors clinched a playoff spot by holding off Jeff Teat and the Black Bears in a meeting of the two top scorers in the league, the Mammoth held off the Roughnecks who were never out of that game, and the Rock beat the already-clinched Rush. And the other three games each featured amazing comebacks including one record-breaking one.

Awesome

Halifax comeback

After 2½ quarters of getting manhandled by the Georgia Swarm, the Halifax Thunderbirds decided enough was enough. Warren Hill locked things down in the net, their defense stepped up and their offense found another gear and dominated the rest of the game. After being down 14–4, they outscored Georgia 12–2 over the next 22 minutes or so, including ten goals in the fourth quarter (tied for the second-most ever; two teams scored 11 in a quarter). Georgia dominated the first half but sometime in the third quarter, everything was reversed. The Georgia announcers noticed it too – Drew Petkoff said something like “The second half has been all Halifax” and when he said that, the Thunderbirds were still down by about four goals. Georgia’s offense just stopped working; perhaps they took their foot off the gas once they were up by ten, and then by the time they realized they needed to slam it down again, it was too late. Brett Dobson was taken out to give Devlin Shanahan some playing time with about seven minutes left, but it was just at the time that Halifax started to pour it on. It was very weird to see a team winning by three or four with a couple of minutes left and they are the ones who are nervous about how the game is going to end.

Warren Hill and the Halifax defense were very good in the second half. I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again – when your goalie makes all the stops he needs to and a few he isn’t expected to, that gives your team confidence and that confidence can drive everyone else to step up their game just a little bit.

It was an absolutely amazing comeback, and literally the biggest on record. Nobody other than Halifax, since 2005 anyway, has come back to tie a game after being down by nine goals, let alone ten. And Halifax has done it twice. In a game in 2020, they were down 12–3 to the Saskatchewan Rush before coming back to tie the game at 14:35 of the fourth, only to lose in overtime.

Unfortunately for the Thunderbirds, this game had a similar ending. Once they completed the comeback and tied the game at 14:10 of the fourth, Jordan MacIntosh scored 32 seconds later to give the Swarm the lead once again, and there was no time for Halifax to recover. I’m not sure what’s more difficult for Halifax – not coming back and losing by a dozen or having the comeback and losing anyway. Hopefully they can take it as a bit of a confidence booster – they know they can come back in a game that seems out of hand. Of course, they’d need to start that comeback just a few minutes earlier. But ideally, they don’t let the game get out of hand in the first place.

Jordan MacIntosh

This season, Georgia had an NLL record streak of eleven straight games allowing fewer than ten goals. But in the other three games they’ve played this season, they averaged 15 goals against. There’s a lot more good than bad there, but the bad is… pretty bad.

Rochester comeback

In Las Vegas, the numbers weren’t quite as big, but the outcome was the same. After Vegas took a commanding 8–1 lead in the first quarter, Rochester started chipping away immediately. They pulled Rylan Hartley for Riley Hutchcraft, who gave them an outstanding effort the rest of the way. Vegas only scored twice in the second and twice in the third while Rochester scored nine over the same timespan, and completed the comeback with two more goals in the first minute and a half of the fourth. The Knighthawks even took the lead a minute later, though that only lasted a minute before Adam Poitras scored his fifth of the game. But this was the second big comeback of the weekend that did not result in a win for the comeback team. Vegas scored five over the last eleven minutes or so and Landon Kells prevented Rochester’s attempts at coming back again.

It was a great game for the backup goaltenders. As I said Rylan Hartley had a terrible start but Hutchcraft came in and played great for Rochester, giving them the stops they needed to build confidence (and I’ll say it again), and that confidence was what they needed to mount the comeback in the first place. No, it wasn’t quite enough and Vegas had a mini-comeback of their own at the end of the fourth.

At the other end, Alex Buque played a pretty decent game overall but once Rochester completed their comeback and took a lead, Kells came in and shut the door on them, stopping all 11 shots he faced over almost twelve minutes.

I don’t know if it’s physical or mental or some combination, but Rylan Hartley just hasn’t been the same since his controversial hit on Steph Charbonneau at the end of January. Before that game, he was 4–1 and had a save percentage of 78% or higher in each of the four wins – four great games and one not-so-good (plus one that he lost but played the full game and wasn’t bad). Since the hit, he’s had one great game (the February 28 overtime win over Saskatchewan where he allowed just ten goals in 62 minutes) and four not-so-good, where he was pulled in every game. In the four games where he was pulled, he only had a save percentage of 60% or higher once. 60% is a really low bar for save percentages. Given how Hutchcraft played on Saturday, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s now Hutchcraft’s net.

Buffalo comeback

The numbers were much lower in this game than the Rochester or Halifax games, but yes, it happened again. Buffalo only managed two goals until more than ten minutes into the third quarter, but they could have been in much worse shape than that – they were only down 6–2 at that point. Chris Origlieri was sensational and the Seals defense was excellent as well, limiting the Bandits’ chances and keeping this powerful offense to just one goal per quarter until the fourth. Buffalo’s defense was very good as well but the Seals offense managed to get just a few more by Matt Vinc.

A four-goal comeback isn’t nearly as big a deal as a seven-goal or ten-goal comeback, but the Bandits were still down by four with less than six minutes left in the fourth quarter. The way Chris Origlieri and the Seals defense was playing, it seemed that a third comeback on the weekend would be unlikely. But the first two comebacks were unlikely anyway, so why not do it again?

Over the next five minutes, Joey Res scored an almost-empty-net quickstick off of a beautiful pass by Dhane Smith (remember that name, it will come up again), Clay Scanlan shook off his defender and scored from the doorstep, and Tehoka Nanticoke cut inside and scored on a weird play where the ball hit the metal bottom of the net and bounced out immediately, forcing a review. Then with 44 seconds left, Dhane Smith shot a bouncer underneath Origlieri to tie the game. But Smith wasn’t done – four minutes into the overtime period, he took an innocent-looking shot from the area he loves to take shots from and it just beat Origlieri for the game winner.

Three huge comebacks on the weekend but the Bandits were the only team to capitalize on theirs.

Kyle Killen

Killen has been solid as a secondary scorer for the Desert Dogs this season and for the Warriors over the previous couple. He’s good for a point or two per game, with a couple of 4- or 5-point games scattered throughout the season. But he’s scored 14 points over the last three games including ten points (5+5) over the two Rochester games, and was looking really confident in those games. He missed three games so he won’t get back to the 59 point range like 2022, at least not this year, but it’s good to see a bit of a resurgence from Killen in Vegas.

Acting like a goalie

Earlier in the season it seemed there was a “zero tolerance” policy with respect to this new “Acting like a goalie” rule. If you were standing in the crease or had your foot on the line, and the ball hit you, you’d get this penalty. It got to the point where I wondered why offensive players weren’t shooting at defenders standing in the crease just to get a penalty call. In recent weeks, the number of such calls has dropped significantly, so it appears that the officials have decided (or have been instructed) to call this penalty only if the defender is actually trying to block shots while standing in the crease. If a defender is in the crease and the ball hits him incidentally, the penalty is no longer called. I fully agree with this decision.

I saw this happen during Friday’s Halifax/Georgia game. This particular penalty was called at least twice during that game. In another case, a Georgia defender was hit by a shot while standing in the crease. But he was focused on the offensive player he was guarding, who didn’t have the ball, and didn’t even know the shot was coming. No penalty was called – the ball did hit him but he wasn’t “acting like a goalie” so there was no reason to give him a penalty for it.

Quickies

• Toronto Rock – The top five teams in the standings right now are Saskatchewan, Vancouver, Colorado, Georgia, and Toronto. The Rock have beaten three of them in their last five games, and lost to the fourth, Georgia, by only one back in January. Nick Rose has played very well in his three games since returning from injury, and the team is gelling at the right time. Watch out for these guys.
• Calgary Cooks – There were three Cooks in the Calgary/Colorado game on Saturday – Tanner and Carter for Calgary and Conner for Colorado. Carter and Conner are brothers, and I believe Tanner is unrelated. Conner had one CTO to his name in that game but nothing else, while Tanner scored two and added three assists and Carter scored his first career goal and added a helper too.
• Andrew Kew – I don’t think I’ve said much about Kew even though he has been awesome all season. He’s the top scorer on his team and top ten in the league despite missing three games. He’s on pace to tie his personal best of 106 points in 16 games in the 2023 season, but he’ll only have played 15 games.
• Keegan Bal – It’s funny that on X, everybody is talking about how nobody is talking about Keegan Bal and what a great season he’s having. I assure you, nobody is sleeping on this guy.

Not Awesome

Georgia collapse

See above.

Las Vegas collapse

See above.

San Diego collapse

This was far less of a “collapse” than the others but still, losing a four goal lead in less than six minutes isn’t great.

Broadcast resolution in San Diego

This has been an issue in the past, and I’ve been told it’s actually a lighting problem rather than a camera problem. I don’t know what causes it, but games broadcast from San Diego are always hard to watch. The video quality was just terrible compared to all the other streams. I was watching that game and the CAL/COL game on NLL+ Multi-View, but I had to switch to watching each game individually because I just couldn’t see anything in the smaller window. Normally if you take a video with bad resolution and make it bigger, it gets even less watchable but somehow not in this case. Watching games from Rochester used to be like this – there was no HD technology in the arena. That’s been upgraded so it’s fine now, so it’s time to do the same to Pechanga by fixing the cameras or lighting or whatever.

Bets

I don’t bet much on sports, but every now and again I’ll see some odds that look better than I think they should be, and throw down a few bucks. I was excited about Georgia being up by so many, since I bet on them, and about Buffalo’s comeback since I bet on them as well. Unfortunately, they were both –1.5 bets, so the teams had to win by two or more. Georgia had it in the bag and let it slip away, and the Buffalo comeback was great and all but an OT win was insufficient.

And if that weren’t bad enough, the site that runs the Who Ya Gott and Preston’s Picks pools didn’t send out the weekly reminder emails, and without the reminder I forgot to make my picks for either one. I was in the top ten overall in one of them and the top 15 in the other. Who Ya Gott doesn’t lock your pick for each game until the game begins, and I realized the problem part-way through the Rush/Rock game, so I was able to get my picks in for four of the six games. I got all of them right. But Preston’s Picks locks ALL the games for the weekend at 6pm or so on Friday, so I was 0–6 in that one.

I would have picked Georgia over Halifax, and I probably would have picked Toronto over Saskatchewan (though I’m not 100% sure) so I would have gotten at least five out of six right. Instead, I dropped 5 spots to 19th in Who Ya Gott and I dropped 25 spots to 34th in Preston’s Picks.

Not a great gambling weekend.