The battle for first place was won by the Bandits… for now. There were low-scoring games all over the place in week 14 – only one of the five games featured more than 21 goals, and two of them had both teams held under 10. Unsurprisingly, goaltending is featured in a number of my Awesome entries this week.
Category Archives: Buffalo Bandits
Faceoffs don’t matter because they do
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.
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 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 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 5
How can we already be talking about Week 5 in the past tense? The season just started, didn’t it? We still have two undefeated teams and two winless teams. In addition, all the games for the 2024 calendar year are now done which means that my talking about the 2025 NLL season as being in progress will sound less like time-travelling. The league does refer to it as the 2024–2025 season, just like the last one was the 2023–2024 season, but I just use the higher number because it’s shorter and a greater percentage of the season will happen in 2025.
2025 NLL Week 4
The NLL standings this season look like what you’d get if you hit the “randomize” button on last year’s standings. Of the top six teams, four of them didn’t make the playoffs last year. Of the bottom five, four of them did. And then there’s Buffalo, and then there’s Las Vegas. Nice to have some consistency, I guess.
2025 NLL Week 3
Wow, what a week in the NLL! Close games, overtime, blowouts, records set and reset, milestones hit… so much awesome. There’s a lot to get to so here we go.
NLL Chatter 