The 2026 trade deadline was this past Monday and once the trades started being announced, it seemed like they just wouldn’t stop. No real blockbusters, but there were a couple of significant deals and a number of smaller trades as well. Las Vegas made a number of moves to improve their team while Philadelphia were clearly sellers.
Then there were the seven games on the weekend. We began with an OT thriller on Friday night and ended with two games decided by seven goals.
There are players in the NLL who seem to move around almost every year. Callum Crawford and Mat Giles played for 12 teams each, and Ryan Benesch is running out of body space for the tattoos he gets of each team he plays for. But there are others who have played every game of their NLL career with the same franchise. Today we’re going to take a look at the top ten single-franchise players in NLL history.
Week 15 wasn’t nearly as busy as week 14, but there were some important results this past weekend. The Rock and Thunderbirds had their offenses working while Colorado and Rochester didn’t, and the FireWolves held off a late surge by the Wings. Next week features a few matchups between teams near each other in the standings: Toronto at Halifax, Philly at Oshawa, Vancouver at Georgia, and Rochester at Las Vegas. Colorado and Buffalo aren’t really near each other in the standings but the way Buffalo has been playing lately, they might be before long. Only San Diego at Saskatchewan and Ottawa at Calgary feature two teams not really near each other in the standings, but would it really shock anyone if the underdogs take those games?
There were ten games this past weekend, which ties for second place among the busiest weekends in NLL history – the last weekend of the 2007 season featured eleven games. Every team played, a bunch of teams played twice, and yet the standings didn’t change an awful lot. The Black Bears, Bandits, and Wings jumped, while the Rock, Seals, Desert Dogs, and Knighthawks dropped but even so, the jumps or drops weren’t huge.
Only four games this past weekend, but they all made my Awesome list in one form or another. If you’ve got some time and you didn’t see any of them, head on over to NLL+ (or TSN.ca in Canada*) and check them out. You will not be disappointed.
We are officially at the halfway point of the season, as every team has now played at least nine games. The Rush are now tied for the fourth-longest single-season winning streak at eight games, the Mammoth are right behind them with a seven-game streak, and the Swarm have won five in a row. At the other end of the spectrum are the Knighthawks and Thunderbirds, who have each lost four straight, and the FireWolves with a five-game losing streak.
Lots of Awesomes and only a couple of Not Awesomes this week, so let’s get to it.
A light week in the NLL with only four games, and all ended up fairly close. The Swarm took out the Rock in OT, the Seals came back to beat the Wings by two, Vancouver led 10–3 in the second until Ottawa surged but couldn’t get closer than three back, and Oshawa got within two with a few minutes left in the fourth before Colorado had a couple of Owen goals (Rahn and Down) to put it away.
We’re about a third of the way through the 2026 NLL season. A bunch of teams are playing as well as expected or even better: Saskatchewan, Rochester, Colorado, Ottawa, Las Vegas, and arguably Georgia. Others are struggling: Calgary, San Diego, Philadelphia, Oshawa, Halifax. I wouldn’t say Buffalo is struggling exactly but maybe not playing as well as the Bandits of the last few years.
There was so much awesome this week that I cut down on the commentary for each entry a little bit. Otherwise this article would be five times as long as my normal articles.
As of week 6, every team has won at least one and lost at least one. Four teams are at .500, five are above, and five are below. The top four teams were in the top five last year, and three of the bottom four were in the bottom four last year. So not much has changed, right? No, it doesn’t feel like that at all, actually.
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