The regular season is almost over and the last two playoff positions are not only down to the wire, but both will be decided in the best way possible: head-to-head.

Ottawa and Halifax meet next Saturday and the winner is in the playoffs, the loser is out.

Meanwhile Las Vegas and San Diego are fighting for the last spot, and they meet twice next weekend. If Las Vegas wins them both, they get the spot. They also get the spot if they win one of them and Rochester beats Georgia twice. In any other scenario, San Diego is in. This means that if Las Vegas and San Diego split their two games and Rochester beats Georgia on Saturday, the very last game of the regular season, Georgia at Rochester on Sunday, will decide the last playoff spot – and neither team involved in the game is affected.

Awesome

Goofy stats

At one point on Saturday night, we were two minutes away from having three different games end with the winning score exactly double the losing score. It would have been the first time in NLL history that this happened in the same week, let alone on the same day. But then Dalton Young scored for the Wings to break the pattern. This is the kind of meaningful and insightful NLL analysis you can get on this site, and no other.

Colby Bowman

After a rough start from Aden Walsh (6 goals in 18 minutes), Roughnecks backup goalie Colby Bowman came in and slammed the door shut. Bowman allowed a single goal on 38 shots in 41:35 for a save percentage of 97.4% and a GAA of 1.44. That’s an excellent GAA for an NHL goalie, but absolutely unheard of for an NLL goalie. That is the lowest GAA for any game where the goalie played at least 40 minutes. This was his longest outing in an NLL game, but his numbers have been very impressive: he’s appeared in seven games and has only allowed two goals in the same game once, a 25 minute appearance in January 2025. His career GAA is 2.06 and his career save percentage is 96.0%. Those are otherworldly numbers. Of course, it’s over only 58 minutes. Nobody expects him to keep those numbers once he’s playing full games more regularly, but it’s a damned impressive start to an NLL career.

And he’s the only player in NLL history named Colby.

Colby Bowman

Warren Hill

Despite the end result, Warren Hill was outstanding in the Halifax net. The Thunderbirds led for most of the game and were still in it right to the end mostly because of Hill. Christian Del Bianco also had a great game but Hill faced eleven more shots and only allowed one more goal, so he actually had a higher save percentage than Del Bianco.

Jesse King

As I said, Warren Hill played an excellent game in Vancouver. But early in the fourth quarter, while his team was down 6–4 and hadn’t scored in over eighteen minutes, Jesse King scored his first of the night. After Casey Wilson and Keegan Bal traded goals (Bal’s goal assisted by Jesse King), King tied the game and then put the Warriors ahead to stay a few minutes later. Keegan Bal has been the go-to guy on the Warriors all season and could certainly be a finalist for MVP, but King is still an elite scorer and this time it was him who powered the Warriors to the comeback victory.

Philly

We know now that the Wings are unlikely to be playing in Philadelphia next season, if they play anywhere at all. It’s still up in the air, but that’s how it’s looking. And we all know that their season on the floor didn’t go so well. So for the Wings to pull in a season-high 9,913 people to their final home game, beating second place by over 3,000, is pretty awesome. Even better was the team’s performance, beating Las Vegas 11–5 in a game they dominated throughout. Lukas Nielsen scored four, Kyle Jackson and Sam LeClair a couple each, and the Wings defense kept Mitch Jones, Jonathan Donville, Connor Kirst, and Kevin Crowley to zero goals. Nick Damude was incredible, making 60 saves – his highest total ever, the highest total this season, Philadelphia’s highest total ever*, and the sixth-highest total in NLL history.

I haven’t had Philly in the Awesome category much this year, or in the last few years actually, because they weren’t great on the floor. Earlier this week I thought about giving them an Awesome regardless of the game outcome, just as a sort of a tribute. But they earned the hell out of this one.

* – This applies to the “Wings 2.0”, not the original Wings. The original Wings played from 1987–2014, but the first nineteen seasons were before game stats became available.

Saskatchewan in the second half

Let’s be honest here – the Rush were pretty terrible in the first half of their game against Colorado. They did not score for the first 27 minutes of the game. They were down 7–0 by the time they scored and 8–1 going into halftime. But Jimmy Quinlan or Derek Keenan (or both) must have given impressive speeches over halftime because two minutes into the third quarter, the Rush scored four goals in 33 seconds, a new NLL record, getting them right back in the game. Jack Hannah is probably the least popular guy in Saskatchewan at the moment because his four goals prevented the Rush from tying the game, but they got within one and made the second half much more entertaining than the first half.

Not Awesome

Ottawa turnovers

Other than Zach Higgins, who played very well, the Black Bears didn’t exactly play like a team whose season was on the line. I thought they played a bit sloppy and they were slow to get on and off the floor. I joked during the game that one of the top lines used in the broadcast was “Costly turnover by Ottawa”. There seemed to be a lot of plays where an Ottawa defender would start jogging up the floor in transition and pass it to a teammate but a Rock player would run in and intercept it, giving the Rock another possession. Note that the Ottawa players were jogging and the Toronto players were running. Not all the time, obviously, but more often than you might expect from a team trying desperately to get into the playoffs for the first time in franchise history.

Swarm discipline

It’s late in the third quarter and the Swarm are down by three – and they’ve only been able to manage four so far. Seth Van Schepen took a 5-minute major for an illegal bodycheck (hitting Wes Berg in the head for no good reason). The team managed to kill off the penalty without allowing a goal, but as soon as that penalty ended, Bryan Cole took another illegal bodycheck penalty and tacked on an unsportsmanlike conduct. There are certainly occasions where a penalty is needed to prevent a goal (or an opportunity for a goal) but unsportsmanlike conduct is never one of them. As the broadcasters said, it’s hard to come back in the game if you’re a man down for almost ten minutes. The Swarm kind of got lucky in that only one goal was scored in both power plays and then Ari Steenhuis took a couple of minors himself to even things up, but dumb penalties are still dumb penalties.