The question of whether faceoffs “matter” in the NLL has come up many times over the years. I’ve tried to answer it myself statistically a couple of times, and the result of my most recent investigation (with help from Cooper Perkins) showed that if your team is great at faceoffs or terrible at faceoffs, they matter but if you’re just OK, they kind of don’t. But not everybody believes it’s as cut-and-dried as that.
Author Archives: Graeme
Trade revisited: Rose to the Rock
Rock goalie Nick Rose was traded to the Calgary Roughnecks earlier today. I’ll probably talk about that particular trade, as well as any other upcoming trades (several of which are rumoured), in another article later but today we’re going to look at how Rose came to the Rock in the first place.
2025 NLL Week 13-14
This week’s report combined weeks 13 and 14 since I was away on vacation last week. The Bandits are no longer undefeated but are still in first place, the Rush and Thunderbirds are hot, the Wings and Rock are not. We’re more than halfway through the season now and the playoff picture looks vastly different than last year’s. Three of the top four teams in 2024 are currently out of the playoffs and two of the bottom three teams last year are currently in. Of course, there are still 51 games left to play and things can and most likely will change.
2025 NLL Week 11
It was Week of the Rookies in the NLL. One of the most anticipated rookies this year made his debut on the weekend, another highly anticipated rookie (and a teammate of the first one) scored one of the best goals of the year, and yet another rookie had his second strong offensive outing in a row. I guess some non-rookies did good things too.
2025 NLL Week 10
Another busy week in the NLL with seven games, though not much really changed. The Bandits are still perfect, the Rock, Knighthawks, and Thunderbirds continue their climb back into the playoff race, the Swarm and Rush continue their strong seasons, and the Black Bears are still having trouble scoring.
2025 NLL Week 9
A light week in the NLL with only four games but it was another exciting week with no shortage of stories.
2025 NLL Week 8
What a wild weekend! We had lacrosse being discussed on the most popular podcast in the world, every team played a game and a couple played two, a sellout in the desert, close games, comebacks, a blowout that turned into less of a blowout, the last winless team winning, and the second NLL broadcast in a language other than English.
2025 NLL Week 7
An incredible week of games starting with one of the best rivalries in the game, despite the results in recent years (Buffalo has won 11 of the past 12 matchups with the Rock since 2022). As I mention below, every game was a comeback to some extent but some were significant comebacks. Halifax/Rochester was as close as a game can be, to the point where we still don’t really know who won it.
Stats Central: Elite scorer vs. committee
From 2018–2020, I wrote a weekly article for IL Indoor called Stats Central. Every week I’d look at various statistics and see what kind of insight we can get from them. All of those articles are listed here.
In 2019, I wrote the article below, where I looked into whether it’s generally better to build your team’s offense around a single superstar player, or to have a more “scoring-by-committee” approach. The conclusion was less than compelling, and so I wrote a different article for that week and shelved this one. I’ve blown the dust off of it, rewritten a bit, and updated the numbers to include the seasons since then.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the Lost Stats Central Article.
2025 NLL Week 6
A light but impactful week in the NLL. There were only three games but one of them got rid of one of the two remaining winless teams (Las Vegas, only Toronto remans), another got rid of one of the two remaining undefeated teams (Georgia, only Buffalo remains), and the third set or tied a handful of NLL records.
NLL Chatter 