On Saturday night, the Toronto Rock returned home to Hamilton (man, that’s a weird sentence) and the Rock faithful were finally able to see the extent of the renovations that forced the team to play in Mississauga last season. I had been looking forward to this for a while. The First Ontario Centre (formerly Copps Coliseum) was opened in the 80’s and was looking a little worn, so having a brand new state-of-the-art facility in downtown Hamilton was going to be exciting. But I have to say that the results were… underwhelming.
Category Archives: Opinion
Presenting the 2026 Panther City Lacrosse Club
I’ve done this for a number of years: I make up a team consisting of players who are not part of any team, whether on an active roster, IR, PUP, holdout list, practice roster, or anything else and who hadn’t retired. Sometimes this team is pretty decent, and there have been years where the team is better than decent – with the right coach and a bit of luck, they could possibly make the playoffs against the existing NLL teams. This year’s team is not bad goaltending-wise but is pretty good defensively and solid up front as well. Not sure they’re making the playoffs against the 2026 NLL teams but they wouldn’t suck.
2025 Offseason report, Part II
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.
Future Hall of Famers, Part II
Recently I wrote about non-players who deserve consideration for induction to the NLL Hall of Fame once their careers are over. In that article, I covered owners as well as broadcasters and today I’m going to cover GMs, coaches and officials.
Future Hall of Famers, Part I
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.
Attendance draw: who are the most popular visiting teams?
I’ve written about attendance in the NLL a number of times over the years but one aspect that I have looked into but never written about is what I call “draw”. This has nothing to do with face-offs, we’re talking about how different teams affect attendance at the opposing arenas.
Trade frenzy on deadline day
Trade deadline day in the NLL was pretty uneventful and boring… until it wasn’t. And then it really really wasn’t. First, former MVP and Goaltender of the Year Christian Del Bianco was sent to the Vancouver Warriors for defender Brayden Laity and some pretty high draft picks. Del Bianco had been holding out this entire season, asking for a trade closer to his home in Vancouver, and since Calgary is the closest team to Vancouver that isn’t Vancouver, there was really nowhere else for him to go.
There were a few other deals made that day as well which I’ll touch on too.
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.
Presenting the 2025 Panther City Lacrosse Club
I haven’t done this in a number of years, but I used to write an article every year announcing the roster of the “Boston Blazers”, starting the year after they folded. The idea was that this was a team made up entirely of players who were not injured and had not retired, but were not on any NLL team’s roster, practice squad, holdout list, etc. There were some years where this phantom team would have been pretty good.
This year, I named the team after Panther City for obvious reasons. I’m not sure this year’s version would beat the Bandits and they probably wouldn’t have beaten last year’s Panther City team either. They may not even make the postseason but I’m not sure they’re finishing last either. If the 39-year-old Bold falters, Carlson starts and we could pick up Laine Hruska or Joel Watson as a third goalie, but goaltending is generally solid. Defence is pretty good and transition isn’t bad, and there’s even a strong face-off guy there in Hamer-Jackson. Up front, there’s a ton of secondary scoring but unless Greer and Schuss play like they did back in the mid-teens, nobody to really grab the reins as a solid #1 forward.
NLL+: Worth the Hype?
This week, the NLL announced their latest attempt at a streaming platform. It’s called NLL+ (similar to Paramount+ and Disney+) and it is a new free service that will provide lots of video content including game replays, highlights, and other video features like interviews and such. Live games will be also available in some areas though significantly, not in the US. Let’s have a look at this new service and what it might be used for. Is this really a big deal?
NLL Chatter 