The unexpected results from round one continued this weekend. The higher-seeded Rock won game one of their battle with the Seals on Friday night, but Sunday saw the Seals battle back to tie the series – with their backup goalie in net, a man who’s seen less than 180 minutes of action this entire season, and only 38 minutes (all last weekend) since early January. Meanwhile, the eight-seed Halifax Thunderbirds dominated their game against the Swarm and now have two chances at home to clinch their first-ever trip to the NLL Finals.

San Diego @ Toronto, Game 1

I wrote about this game here.

Halifax @ Georgia

It was like déjà vu all over again. Halifax was down by three in the second, when they suddenly seem to figure out Brett Dobson, which nobody has been able to do all season. They scored five straight as part of an 8–1 run and take a 9–5 lead, and Georgia was not able to recover. Sounds a bit like Halifax’s quarterfinal win over Vancouver, does it not? Unlike the Warriors, Georgia managed to score a few in the second half and keep it close, but the Thunderbirds still scored the last three goals of the game and kept Georgia from scoring for the last nine minutes. I’m starting to wonder if taking an early lead against Halifax is not in your best interest.

Brett Dobson was good but Warren Hill was excellent. Remember those guys at the beginning of the season who wondered if Hill was the right guy for the starting goalie job in Halifax? I remember those guys, because I’m pretty sure I was one of them. Damn, this crow tastes terrible, but I earned it. Hill was excellent in the second half of the season and has been incredible so far in the playoffs.

Clarke Petterson

One thing I noticed, and the stats bear this out, is that both teams seemed to miss the net with shots all night. The game sheet shows Halifax taking 65 shots on goal, which is a lot, but also 29 shots off goal. The Swarm took 42 on goal and 23 off. I don’t track shots off goal for NLLStats.com so I don’t know for sure but that seems like an awful lot. Maybe the goalies were playing well enough that the forwards felt that they had no choice but to pick corners with every shot, and that results in a higher chance of missing the net entirely.

Clarke Petterson picked up nine points (2+7) for the T-birds, Jason Knox continued his hot playoff run with four goals and a couple of helpers, and Brendan Bomberry scored a couple against his old team. For the Swarm, the points were widely spread out as Richie Connell was the only player with more than one goal and only three players had more than one assist. Then again, they only scored seven goals so there weren’t that many points available. Game two goes next Saturday night in Halifax, and if Game three is required, it’ll be next Sunday night in Halifax (see below).

Toronto @ San Diego, Game 2

As was said a number of times on the broadcast, it’s been a few years since a team lost the first game of a three-game series and came back to win the series. The Rock went into San Diego trying to prevent that from happening and to get to their first finals appearance since 2015, but the Seals dominated just about every facet of game two. The series will now continue next Saturday night in Hamilton, winner take all.

Nick Rose didn’t have the best game ever, nor did Toronto’s defense. Rose just wasn’t seeing the ball well and the defense wasn’t as strong at preventing shots as they have been. At the other end of the floor, the San Diego defense was very strong, not giving the Rock good looks at all, and Cam Dunkerley was simply outstanding. He has been a starter in the NLL in the past, for New York in 2024, and while that wasn’t a great season for him, he had some very good games. But allowing only six goals in 60 minutes is a new record for him, and an 85.7% save percentage is the second best game of his career in that category. He was seeing the ball well, stopping everything we expected him to stop, and a bunch we didn’t. He kept the Rock off the board entirely for more than 37 minutes from the first to the third quarters.

Dylan Watson seems to have inherited his father’s ability to step up his game in the playoffs. Watson scored four goals on Sunday, something he’s only done once before in his NLL career. He now has four points in three straight playoff games, something he’s never done in the regular season. San Diego has been talking about Wes Berg as Mr. Clutch for years, and it’s certainly not that I didn’t believe them before, but boy, is he showing that in this series. He’s only scored one goal in the series but he has twelve helpers, fights for loose balls, fights for his teammates, and is generally demonstrating the leadership you expect from your captain.

After the Seals lead got to six in the third quarter, the Rock tried to mount a comeback but San Diego refused to give up momentum. The Rock cut the lead to five on five different occasions over the last twenty minutes of the game, but the Seals scored the next goal after every one of them except the last, at which point it was basically over anyway.

Kudos to the Seals for an excellent game, and kudos to Cam Dunkerley for an incredible performance.

Not Awesome

Georgia loses out on a home playoff game

Since Georgia is the higher-seeded team in their series, they should host games one and three and Halifax should host game two. But there’s a problem: after last Saturday night, Gas South Arena is booked solid. After trying to find a different place to play and even considering neutral sites (Oshawa was apparently on the table), the league has decided that if there’s a game three, it will be played in Halifax. There’s really not much else they can do.

Yes, it sucks for Georgia fans. Nobody will argue that. But there’s precedent for it. In 2007, the Rochester Knighthawks finished the season 14–2 and won their last twelve straight games. They unquestionably earned the right to host the Championship, but they couldn’t. It sounds like a joke but there was a circus in Rochester, and they had the arena booked. The Knighthawks also tried to find another site but failed, and the Championship game was held in Arizona. The Knighthawks won anyway, but their fans had to watch it on whatever the equivalent of NLL+ was at the time.

So it’s happened before, and no, it’s not ideal. Then again:

• hosting one extra game in the arena that was third in attendance instead of the one that was thirteenth isn’t such a bad thing for the league as a whole
• the Swarm had home-floor advantage in game one and squandered it, so I don’t feel as bad about them losing that advantage in game three.

I’ve been around this league long enough to know that there will be people on social media screaming about how this is such a bad look for the league and it’s a bush league move and god the nll sucks and and and… Get over it. It’s par for the course when you’re the second, third, or even fourth tenant in your building.

If Georgia comes back and wins this series, we may run into the same problem in the finals because the arena is also booked the weekend that the finals are scheduled to start. The Swarm are the highest remaining seed in the playoffs so regardless of who they’d play, they should host games one and three but if the arena isn’t available, well, that could get interesting.