The 2026 NLL regular season has come to an end. The standings are final and the playoff bracket is set. You’ve probably seen the matchups in other places but just in case, next weekend we’ll have Vancouver hosting Halifax at 10:00 (all times Eastern) on Friday night, and three games on Saturday: Georgia hosting Buffalo at 7:30 and Colorado hosting San Diego and Saskatchewan hosting Toronto, both at 9:00.

2026 saw a couple of records set in terms of “best season of all time”, both by Brett Dobson. His save percentage of 84.7% beat Doug Jamieson’s 82.9% in 2020. His GAA of 7.86 is almost a full point better than second place Aaron Bold’s 8.73 in 2014. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just witnessed the best season by a goaltender, statistically, in NLL history.

Awesome

Constant action

On Saturday night, I watched lacrosse non-stop from about 4:30pm until 12:30am. That’s eight solid hours of lacrosse – and I missed half an hour at the beginning because I was late. Seven games in one day (somewhat spread out so we didn’t have them all at the same time) was pretty awesome. But for the first round of the playoffs, the best we can hope for is two or maybe three games in one day. In the second round it’ll be no more than two on one day, and in the finals we might get two in one weekend. There are at least ten but at most thirteen games left in the 2026 NLL season.

Halifax

Considering both teams were playing for their playoff lives, it’s a bit surprising that this wasn’t a closer game. Warren Hill has had an up-and-down season, following the two-wins-then-two-losses pattern almost the entire season. But on Saturday night he was excellent, putting up his third-highest save percentage of the season at 87.2% and only allowing five goals. The defence in front of him was strong and their transition game was great. The offense was pretty strong but a bunch of goals came from some rather unlikely sources. Bowhunter and Hossack each had their first multi-goal game of the season, Colton Armstrong scored his fourth of the year, Curtis Romanchych his third, and Trevor Smyth his second.

Curtis Romanchych

As for Ottawa, Teat had five points, Hellyer four, and O’Connor three, and there were a few with one. Teat and Hellyer had 16 and 12 shots on goal respectively, but only one other player even had three. Teat is obviously a great player, made even better with Hellyer there, but other players need to shoot occasionally, or the defences will just focus on Teat and Hellyer and shut Ottawa down, which is exactly what Halifax did.

Oshawa

Any team in this league can beat any other team on any given night. Everyone says this, but we know that it’s not always true, right? We know the Bandits could take out the FireWolves without much of a problem, right? Well, I can’t say whether or not the Bandits were thinking that way before Saturday’s game but I can tell you that the FireWolves were not. Buffalo was sloppy and looked unprepared while Oshawa was firing on all cylinders and Doug Jamieson and his defense were excellent as the FireWolves did the unthinkable.

For the Bandits, Smith, Byrne, Resetarits, and Buchanan did all the scoring – only three other players even had assists. But the Bandits offense just couldn’t get much of anything going against the Oshawa defense. There were a ton of shot-clock violations and shots that missed the net. For Oshawa, Theede had three, Kurtz had two, and seven other players all had singles. Buffalo’s defense was strong as usual but the FireWolves seemed to be able to solve them more often than we’ve seen in the second half of this season.

The FireWolves weren’t great in all facets of the game though. They ran into some penalty trouble, though most of that was one guy. Emerson Clark took two completely unnecessary penalties at the same time in the third quarter, giving the Bandits a full seven-minute power play. But thanks to Oshawa’s defense and Doug Jamieson, the Bandits were only able to score a single goal in those seven minutes. Twenty minutes later, Clark took another minor plus two misconducts and was tossed from the game. He ended up with 29 penalty minutes in the game by himself, more than all other FireWolves combined, and more than the entire Bandits team.

Tucker out Lymphoma night in Oshawa

There are a few Tucker Out Lymphoma nights across the NLL now – one in Las Vegas, one in Buffalo, and Saturday night was Oshawa’s turn. I have no idea how much money these events have raised for the various children’s cancer charities in the twelve years they’ve been happening, but the number is probably pretty impressive. The fact that both the Bandits and FireWolves had special jerseys for this game was pretty awesome, and both teams getting together for a picture before the game was amazing.

Given the hostilities during the game, it’s probably good that they did the picture before the game and not after.

Colby Bowman

Colby Bowman made his NLL Chatter Awesome debut last week after an amazing performance in relief. And what does he do a week later? He has another one. Bowman came in only 1:37 into the game down 2–0 and allowed a goal a minute later. But then he allowed nothing for the next 31 minutes, and only five more goals the rest of the game. This was against the Colorado Mammoth by the way, who were 12–5 before this game and second overall in the league.

Bowman now has a career 4.51 GAA and 90.8% save percentage. Sure, those numbers are a bit worse than last week (2.06 / 96.0%) but they are still staggering.

Underdogs

On the last weekend of the season, both the 6–12 Calgary Roughnecks and the 6–12 Oshawa FireWolves were able to beat two of the hottest teams in the league, the 12–6 Mammoth and the 11–7 Bandits, who were on a seven game winning streak. And in the case of Oshawa, this was not a meaningless game – the Bandits could have clinched a first round home game with a victory. And since Georgia won on Sunday, the Bandits missed that opportunity entirely and now have to play round one on the road.

Rochester Native American Heritage jerseys

On Sunday, the Knighthawks wore their Native American Heritage night jerseys. Even if you ignore the awesome return to the teal and purple, these jerseys are amazing. I love all the Indigenous jerseys and these are no exception. Not only are they beautiful, but I love the fact that they explain the meaning behind the symbols on the jersey.

The Knighthawks Native American night jersey, designed by Randee Spruce

Not Awesome

Ottawa

They have arguably the best lacrosse player on the planet in Jeff Teat. They decided they needed a powerful offensive righty to balance Teat on the other side, so they went and got Rob Hellyer. He has been as good as they expected, if not better. They have other strong offensive players like O’Connor, Kearnan, and Sundown (not so much on Saturday, but generally). They have one of the best defensive players in the league in Callum Jones and other strong defenders in Noseworthy, Marinier, Brownell, and Magnan. They have some young guys (Stevens, Volkov, Kurtz) but lots of veteran leadership (Brownell, Noseworthy, Caputo, Magnan). In net, they have Zach Higgins, a solid goaltender who is fully capable of stealing a game here and there and Tyler Carlson, one of the most well-respected backup goalies in the league. And yet, they still have never been to the playoffs. So what are they missing?

On the surface, it looks like it’s offense. They lost ten games this season and in seven of them (including each of their last five games), they did not reach 10 goals. Even in their eight wins, they only got beyond 11 goals three times. But then again, if we add up the points for the top 4 scorers on each team, Ottawa has 333, which is 6th in the league. Oddly, the top teams are Las Vegas and Rochester with 350, and neither of those teams made the playoffs, so maybe that’s not a great metric to choose.

Only four teams gave up more goals than the Black Bears, so perhaps defense is their problem after all. Higgins had a pretty decent season with a 10.86 GAA, but one of the worst of his career in terms of save percentage at 77.6%. That’s not terrible but maybe we can add Ottawa to the list of teams (including Rochester and Las Vegas) who might be looking to make some changes between the pipes in the off-season.

NLL+ out of sync?

I saw a tweet by the Vancouver Warriors during their game showing a video of Marcus Klarich scoring to make the score 11–5. My NLL+ feed indicated it was live (and I refreshed the page to make sure) but the score was 9–5. Klarich’s goal wasn’t scored for another several minutes, including a media timeout. Later, I watched Keegan Bal score and at the same time, the game sheet on NLL.com showed Charalambides scoring more than two minutes later.

I’ve seen the stream behind by 4–5 seconds or so, but nowhere near this long. I enjoy making and reading comments on X while watching games, so knowing what will happen two minutes from now made me not want to watch that game.