My goodness, the second half of the off-season was crazy busy. We had the new CBA finally agreed upon and signed, and then an absolute frenzy of free agent signings. Many free agents returned to their previous team but an awful lot of them signed somewhere else. If only half of those signings result in a compensatory first round draft pick in 2026, the first round of that draft could have 25 picks in it.
Anyway, he’s a summary of what’s happened since I last rapped at ya back in September.
The National Lacrosse League Hall of Fame is a very important place. It contains players, coaches, GMs, journalists, and officials that have had a significant effect on the league during their careers. However, it’s also not a place at all, in the sense that there is no specific location associated with it. You can’t go and visit the NLL Hall of Fame like you can the Ontario Lacrosse Hall of Fame (in St. Catharine’s, Ontario), the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame (in New Westminster, BC), or the National [American] Lacrosse Hall of Fame in Sparks, MD.
It also seems to have fallen off the radar of the league itself, since only one group of people has been inducted into the Hall in the last ten years.
There was only one game this past weekend but it was an exciting game, particularly the crazy ending. The finals are now set and will feature the Buffalo Bandits hosting the Saskatchewan Rush in a rematch of the 2016 finals. The Rush won that series in two straight but both teams are very different now. The 2025 Finals will be a great series.
And then there were three.
Christian Del Bianco and the Vancouver Warriors played two strong games, but Matt Vinc and the Bandits were just too much for them and the Bandits swept their semi-final series. Buffalo will now need to wait a week to see who they will host in the 2025 NLL Finals, and then wait another week to actually play again.
The Rush went into Halifax and won, but as I’ll explain below, it was a much closer game than the score would indicate, at least until the last few minutes of the game.
We are through the first round of 2025 playoff games. Home fans in all four cities were sent home happy as the higher seeds prevailed in each quarterfinal game, and the semifinal matchups are set. The defending champion Buffalo Bandits will take on the unbeaten-in-seven Vancouver Warriors, and the Halifax Thunderbirds, fresh off their first-ever playoff win, will meet the Saskatchewan Rush, fresh off their first playoff win in six years. These series are going to be amazing.
For all you fans of NLL teams that are not in the playoffs, or maybe those of you who want to bet some bucks on the NLL playoffs, here is a handy reference guide for why each playoff team may or may not win the Championship.
That will do it for the 2025 regular season. Seems like just a few weeks ago we were getting ready to start the season and now it’s already over. But of course, the playoffs are an entirely different beast, and even though there are no more than thirteen games left before the long off-season, those games will be the most meaningful ones played all season. There was an awful lot of Awesome this past week, so let’s get into it.
Every year, we see some great performances by backup goaltenders, forced to come into a game early or to make a start because the regular starter is unavailable. I have no stats on this at all (I know, that’s not like me) but it seems to me that there have been a lot of such performances this season.
We’re a little closer to knowing the playoff picture but incredibly, the only thing that was decided this past weekend was that the Rush have clinched a home playoff game. Buffalo and Saskatchewan are now tied for first, with Buffalo holding the tiebreaker, but there are still six other teams (COL, GEO, HFX, ROC, SD, VAN) that could still finish first overall. Four more (ALB, CAL, OTT, TOR) could finish as high as third, and the Wings could finish as high as sixth. Alternatively, any of those teams except Buffalo and Saskatchewan could finish tenth or lower. For example, with only three weeks left in the regular season, the Rock could finish 3rd or 14th.
Just like last year, the playoff race could come down to the very last weekend, or even the very last game, of the season. Once again, unified standings FTW.
Another busy weekend in the NLL with seven games. Blowouts were the name of the game this weekend, as four of the seven games featured a team that led by at least nine goals and three of them led by eleven. To balance things out, we had a one-goal game and a two-goal game, but most of the games were decided well before the fourth quarter even started.
I have more Not Awesomes than Awesomes this week, which is unusual, but even the Not Awesomes aren’t really that bad.
NLL Chatter 