What a week! Entirely home team wins except in Philly, four OT games, a few big comebacks, a last-place team almost beating a second-place team, a player tying a legend for a goals record, and another player almost tying another one. Let’s get to it!
Category Archives: Buffalo Bandits
2024 NLL Week 16 report
We’re getting close to the end of the season now. The Rock have clinched a playoff spot, though the other teams are still a week or two away from either clinching or being eliminated. The NLL Stats playoff scenario calculator (aka “Could Happen…”) is live on nllstats.com now, so feel free to go play around with that to see what scenarios are possible. For example, it’s possible for there to be a nine-way tie for first place, which means that one of the teams tied for first will miss the playoffs.
2024 NLL Week 15 report
I didn’t get a chance to do a week 14 report but it would have been minimal since I only saw the Rock/Desert Dogs game. I did watch the Rock/Seals game later on but that’s it. This week however, there were eight games and I watched a good chunk of them. I even had multiple games on at the same time for a while – Rush/Bandits on one screen and Roughnecks/Swarm on the other, since both games were tied in the final minutes of the fourth quarter. I muted Buffalo while Georgia was in OT, and as soon as the Swarm scored the game-winner, I killed that feed and went back to Buffalo and managed to see the game-winner there as well.
2024 NLL Week 10
The parity in the NLL gave us a bunch of exciting games this weekend and few games you might call upsets. But if you bet on lacrosse, you might be more inclined to phrase it as “parity reared its ugly head this weekend”. The old cliche of “any team can beat any other team on any given night” continues to hold true. In addition to some great games, we had a few milestones reached, and in the Not Awesome category, I make a suggestion that the NLL should implement, and it would likely only require them to upgrade many or all of the NLL arenas and cost them an insane amount of money!
Vinc vs. Rose II – the GSAA statistic and what it means
Recently, I wrote about Matt Vinc and Nick Rose and how their career stat lines are quite similar, other than the Goaltender of the Year awards they’ve won, where Vinc is ahead 8-0. My initial thesis was that their stat lines were very similar but Vinc has had more post-season success, which implies that the teams he’s been on have been better than Rose’s. So can we conclude that Rose, with similar stats on worse teams, is actually the better goalie? The conclusion, based on the GSAA (Goals Saved Above Average) stat, was that no, Vinc has been the better goalie.
But how does the GSAA stat tell us this? Specifically, if Nick Rose’s save percentage is very close to Matt Vinc’s, why is Vinc’s GSAA so much higher than Rose’s? Today, we’re going to see if we can answer that question by looking at this stat, how it’s calculated, and what it really means.
For the examples below, we’re using numbers from the 2023 NLL season. In 2023, Rose had a save percentage of 80.47% and a GSAA of 23.50. Vinc had a save percentage of 80.30% and a GSAA of 25.16. We can see that Rose’s save percentage was actually higher than Vinc’s, but he had a lower GSAA. Let’s find out why.
2024 NLL Week 9
Wow, what a week! Exciting games, a couple of upsets, a loss by a previously-undefeated team, and some record-setting performances. Let’s get right into it.
Game report: Buffalo @ Toronto
I haven’t done one of these in a while. I usually fold my thoughts about games I attend into the Awesome or Not Awesome section of my weekly report, but there was so much to say about this one that I split it out into its own report.
Vinc vs. Rose
I happened to notice a while ago that Matt Vinc and Nick Rose had very similar stats lines over their careers. Vinc’s career GAA is 10.73, Rose’s is 10.53. Vinc’s save percentage is 78.8%, Rose’s is 78.6%. Each was ahead of the other in these stats in some seasons. But Vinc has won an amazing eight Goaltender of the Year awards and is widely considered the GOAT, while Rose has been a finalist four times but hasn’t won any. Does it make sense that Vinc’s stats were that similar to Rose’s but Vinc has received far more accolades?
2024 NLL Week 7
A whole lotta games this past weekend, even with the Rush/Wings one postponed. There was also a whole lotta awesome in those games, and the not awesomes are two teams that shouldn’t be as bad as they are.
2024 NLL Week 3
It’s only week three of the season and I’ve already listed Albany under “Awesome” twice, and both Vancouver and Saskatchewan have gone from Not Awesome to Awesome. If you’re a Bandits fan, everything about their game on Saturday was awesome (and most of it was pretty awesome even if you’re not a Bandits fan), Albany, Vancouver, and Saskatchewan looked really good this past weekend, and BREAKING NEWS: Lyle Thompson is a good lacrosse player.
NLL Chatter 