It was like watching The Usual Suspects or No Way Out for the first time – what an ending! Many of the questions we all had about playoff positioning were answered on Friday and Saturday, but the final playoff decision came down to the very last game of the season. You can’t ask for better drama and excitement than that.
Category Archives: Opinion
Top 50 lists
We sports fans love our lists. We love to make them and we love to argue about them. Rankings of teams (“power rankings”), top players in various categories, top players overall, and so on. Even a Hall of Fame can be viewed as a list of the best all-time players, coaches, refs, etc. Power rankings has always seemed like an odd one to me, since the league standings is the most accurate ranking of teams that you can get, particularly in the NLL now that there are no divisions. Maybe early in the season a team could be over- or under-performing and so they might be better or worse than their record would indicate, but by about the mid-way point of the season, most teams are exactly what their record indicates.
IL Indoor has done its list of the top 50 players for many years, and I had a vote in a number of those. This year the NLL itself has published its own top 50 list, gathered from votes from the various coaches and GMs around the league. Not to be outdone, the PLL is in the process of releasing their top 50 list as well, apparently voted on by the players themselves, though I have my doubts. More on that later.
Let’s look at the lists from these various sources. Don’t worry, I’m not going through each of the lists in exhaustive detail, nor am I posting my own list. I’m just looking at a few highlights and things they got wrong we disagree on.
2022 Off-season summary, Part I
Man, you take one little summer off from writing about lacrosse and what happens? THINGS. Things happen. Lots of things.
We have new winners for NLL awards, we have a new team that has players now, we have a new commissioner, we have a new CBA, we have trades, we have free agent signings, we have retirements, and we have coaching changes. And we still have over three months until the season actually begins!
There have been enough off-season changes that I’ve broken this article into two parts. Let’s get started.
Do Faceoffs Matter? Part II
This is the second part of a two-part series investigating whether faceoffs help you win in the NLL and if so, how much. In part I, we discovered that faceoffs do matter to some extent, in that teams that win more than half the faceoffs in a game tend to win that game a little more than half the time. Now we’re onto the “how much” question, and here’s where the math gets a little heavier.
To help us with this question I have called on Cooper Perkins, the Seals play-by-play announcer, stats geek, and the creator of LaxMetrics.com. Cooper is great at breaking down stats in ways I wouldn’t have thought of so I was hoping he could add some interesting insight, and he didn’t disappoint. The rest of this article and the data and graphs were all provided by Cooper. Thanks to him for joining me on this faceoff adventure.
Do Faceoffs Matter? Part I
It’s an age-old question among lacrosse people: do faceoffs matter? Does it make sense to have a dedicated faceoff specialist, or is it sufficient to just find someone who’s pretty good at it? Logically, it makes sense that they do matter. More faceoff wins means more possessions. More possessions should lead to more goals, and more goals leads to more wins. Right? Maybe.
This article is the first of a two-part series in which we attempt to answer that question. I will start off by looking over some faceoff and win-loss numbers to see what insight they can provide. That will be Part I. Part II will be a special “crossover episode” with a special guest author, and will get a little deeper into the numbers. More on that later.
Laxmetrics.com
I wrote about lacrosse stats for IL Indoor for almost ten years. Now that I’m not doing that anymore, someone creates a web site with a zillion NLL stats. Figures.
laxmetrics.com is a new site created by San Diego PxP guy Cooper Perkins, and it contains an insane amount of data, way more than I have had access to over the last ten years. I’ve generally been dealing with directly-measurable stats (goals, loose balls, penalties, etc.), and then doing math to combine them, aggregate them, average them, and so on. Some of the data available here is the same – taking the data we get from game sheets and such and “manipulating” it to try and get something meaningful. For example, the “plus” stats (goals+, assists+, and so on) basically compare a player’s production against the league average, and gWAR (goalie wins above replacement) uses goals for and against to attempt to “quantify how many wins a goaltender is directly responsible for creating”.
However most of the stats require more work and you just can’t get them from the boxscore. For example, there are several types of assists listed here:
- “First order assists” are different from regular assists in that the intention of the passer is taken into account. For example, if a transition player casually tosses the ball to a forward before heading off the floor and the forward scores (with no intervening passes), that transition player gets an assist which is arguably not as “deserved” as other assists. First order assists only counts passes that are directly intended to lead to a shot.
- A “second order assist” is the equivalent of a first order assist but for second assists. Sometimes second assists are meaningful and necessary for the goal, while others are not.
- An “unrealized assist” is a pass that results in a scoring opportunity but no goal is actually scored. We’ve all seen outstanding passes that result in a shot that misses the net or that the goalie saves, and of course no assist is credited.
- A “pick assist” occurs when a player without the ball sets a pick or does something else off-ball that directly contributes to a goal. Because the player never touched the ball, he won’t be given an assist.
Of course, teammates and coaches notice these kinds of plays and sometimes broadcasters will mention them as well, but normally they get no other credit. Now they do.
Dhane Smith, league leader in Facilitator Score and Weighted Assists
The problem with those sorts of stats is that the league doesn’t keep track of them, so someone (Cooper, presumably) has to sit and watch every second of every game, looking for these things and recording them. He has to hope the feed stays up, the cameraman catches everything, players names or numbers are visible so you can tell who did what, and so on. NLL games are generally around 2h15m long, and there’s probably a lot of going back and forth, watching a single play a dozen times to make sure you got everything. You can skip timeouts and commercials and such, but I imagine it still takes several hours per game to gather all of this information. (Update: I heard Cooper on the Off the Crossebar podcast the other day and he says it takes him about 35-40 minutes per game, so perhaps this isn’t the time commitment I thought it would be but it’s still significant work.)
In addition, most of these stats are very subjective. Was that pass really essential to the goal? There was a great pass followed by a shot from a bad angle that didn’t go in – was that enough of a quality scoring chance to warrant an unrealized assist? But even loose balls and face-off wins can be somewhat subjective, and we rely on someone else to make those decisions, so this is really no different.
Honestly, I don’t love how the data is presented on the site. Most pages look like an Excel spreadsheet embedded in the middle of a blog post. Given that the site is created with WordPress, that’s probably exactly what it is. In some cases, this is just as good as showing an HTML table. But for example, the leaderboard page makes you scroll left-to-right to see the data. Given the amount of unused space on each side of the chart, this is ugly. But who cares, really, it’s the data and the interpretation of the data that really matters. The page has only been up for a week or two so perhaps “make it pretty” is still on the TODO list. I’ve had this blog for ten years and have put pretty close to (read: exactly) zero time into making it pretty, so I really shouldn’t complain.
I appreciate the amount of work all of this is, which is why I don’t do it. But the fact that someone is doing it and publishing the results of the analysis is crazy awesome.
The PLL and the indoor league
I’m a fan of the PLL. They seem like a first-rate operation, they treat their players well, they market themselves well, and they’ve obviously given a lot of thought to the game itself and how to improve it. The end result is a league featuring great players and great teams that’s a lot of fun to watch. But I do have an issue with their social media team.
NLL team movement: Here we go again?
It was announced on Monday (and the league confirmed it on Tuesday) that the New England Black Wolves will be relocating to Albany for the 2021-2022 season.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
OK, maybe that snarky comment is a little unfair since we haven’t had nearly the team movement over the past ten seasons or so as we did over the previous… all of them.
In the ten years from 2002-2011, the NLL added 11 teams, remove 10, and relocated 5. Not a single season began with the exact same teams as the previous year. In fact, in the nineteen seasons from 1994-2012, there were no consecutive seasons with the same teams. At least one team was added, moved, or folded every single year. “Stability” was not a word the NLL was familiar with at the time.
In contrast, from 2012-2021, there were four teams added (Philly, San Diego, Rochester, New York, plus Panther City coming next year), one removed (Boston), and five relocations (six if you include the Vancouver Stealth becoming the Vancouver Warriors). There were three seasons in that time where the number and location of teams didn’t change from the previous season, and for the first time in the thirty-year history of the league, we had three consecutive seasons (2016-2018) with the same teams.
But back to New England. No reason was given by the Black Wolves ownership group for selling the team, but it’s very likely the same reason as the sale of just about every other team: they were losing money. It’s no secret that attendance in New England wasn’t stellar. Most games in Buffalo or Calgary had double the attendance of your average Black Wolves home game, and most games in Saskatchewan had triple.
Aside: the Mohegan Sun group (owners of the Black Wolves) made no secret of the fact that they bought the team mainly to bring more people into the casino, or at least have them spend more time (and thus money) there. The COVID-19 pandemic likely cut Mohegan Sun’s revenue significantly, and so it likely played a big role in this decision, but we have no way to know. I’m not going to pretend that attendance was the only reason for selling the team, but it’s the only real numbers we have.
In their six seasons in New England, the Black Wolves averaged 4,871 fans per home game. This is 35th overall in the history of NLL teams, which is not great but it’s ahead of 11 other teams including the New York Riptide, Ontario Raiders, and each of the San Jose, Washington, and Vancouver Stealths.
But if you exclude their first two seasons, their average jumps to 5,420 per game. Still not spectacular, but higher than the Georgia Swarm and last year’s Knighthawks.
So how does Albany compare? Albany’s four-year average was 4,201. Oddly, their lowest season average was 3,508 when they were 14-2 and lost in the Championship game to the Rock. That said, they did get over 5,000 fans out to the semi-final game that year and almost 9,300 to the final.
But the Attack played in the NLL from 2000-2003, so the numbers we’re talking about here were literally decades ago. An awful lot can change in that amount of time. I won’t go over all of the recent changes in Albany since Bob Chavez already has on IL Indoor.
The Black Wolves were bought by an ownership group led by a man named Oliver Marti, who played in the NLL for the New York Saints in 1994-1995. He and others in his investment group are also investors in the PLL. Does this mean that the team will definitely succeed in Albany? Of course not. But in the 2000’s, the NLL was filled with rich team owners who seemed to have watched half a lacrosse game and thought “I can bring this sport to <random city> and make some bucks!”. The entirely of the league’s due diligence was the question “Do you have the $2 million expansion fee?”, after which the rich guy was granted a franchise which they sold or folded a couple of years later.
Marti was a good enough lacrosse player to make the NLL, which means he’s probably played since he was a kid. He’s been around the sport and the league long enough to know how difficult it is to make money as an owner of an NLL team. This is also the first NLL team that’s been purchased and moved since, ironically, the Philadelphia Wings were bought and moved to New England in 2014. I have a lot more trust in the league’s ability to vet potential owners and markets now than 15-20 years ago.
Yes, this kind of thing used to happen all the time in the NLL, and so a lot of long-time fans are probably thinking “here we go again”. But it’s not nearly as common anymore. I’m not saying Albany will be the next Saskatchewan, but they probably won’t need to pull in 15,000 people per game in order to make money. I’m hopeful but since I was around during the crazy 2000’s, I’ll call it “cautious optimism.”
Fort Worth, Panther City
Back in July, the NLL announced that its latest expansion team would begin play in the 2021-2022 season in Fort Worth, Texas. This week, the name, logo, and colors of the team was announced, and lacrosse twitter went nuts over the Panther City Lacrosse Club.
With any announcement like this, you’re going to get people who love it, people who hate it, and those in the middle. The most recent NLL team name announcements (the Wings, Thunderbirds, Seals, and Riptide) were generally well received. I did hear a couple of complaints that the Wings should have chosen a new name but those people are simply wrong. The new Knighthawks team name and the rebranding of the Stealth into the Warriors weren’t quite as well received, but weren’t universally despised either. But like most internet-based complaining, haters hated for a short while, then whatever they hated became the new norm and they forgot that they hated it.
The Panther City announcement might have been the most polarizing of them all. There were many, myself included, who weren’t really sure what to think at the beginning. I certainly didn’t think “Wow, that’s awesome!” when I heard the name, but I didn’t hate it either. I saw a lot of positive comments, some from fans (or hopefully-soon-to-be fans) in Texas who are excited to have a team near them.
But there were a fair number of negative comments as well, from fans, journalists, and even former NLL players. There seemed to be two major problems:
- With this name, it’s not clear where the team plays, and
- The “Lacrosse Club” part of the name is unusual
Have you ever heard of Fort Worth referred to as the Panther City? I hadn’t. Some cities have nicknames that are known far and wide: Chicago is the Windy City, Portland (Oregon) is the Rose City, New York is the Big Apple, etc. but many others have nicknames that are only known locally. Ever heard of Hamilton, Ontario referred to as the Waterfall City? I hadn’t until I moved here, and I suspect nobody outside Hamilton knows that name. This one is likely the same: people from that part of Texas may know what “Panther City” refers to, but others won’t.
I’m curious what people thought when the name “Golden State Warriors” was announced in 1971. I think California having the nickname of “Golden State” is a little more well-known than Panther City, but it’s still not obvious. Most comparisons have been made to European soccer; there is no city or town in Italy called “Juventus” and the team called Rangers that plays in Glasgow is not the “Glasgow Rangers”, it’s just “Rangers Football Club”. North American soccer is similar – a team called “Chivas USA” played in MLS for ten years. They were based in Los Angeles, but I had to look that up.
So “Panther City” doesn’t tell most people where the team is based. But really, so what? The Georgia Swarm, Colorado Mammoth, New York Riptide, and Saskatchewan Rush use the name of their state or province rather than the city they play in. The New England Black Wolves are even less specific, using the collective name of a half-dozen states all gathered together.
As for the Lacrosse Club part of the name, that’s also drawn comparisons to soccer teams as well as to the PLL. All of the PLL teams have “Lacrosse Club” in their name, but nobody says that part of it. It’s just Atlas and Chaos. Now and then you might see Atlas LC or Chaos LC written, but not usually. Hell, the name of the Toronto Maple Leafs is officially “The Toronto Maple Leafs Hockey Club”, and other teams in the NHL and other leagues do the same thing.
Personally, I think the name is growing on me. There are teams in other leagues with a location and no nickname (Toronto FC and a few other MLS teams), and I find those boring and unimaginative. There are teams with a nickname and no location (Juventus, Rangers), and that’s more interesting. This one is different because the nickname is the location but it’s obscure.
“Fort Worth Panthers” would have been fine. Not fantastic, but fine. If it was just “Fort Worth Lacrosse Club”, I wouldn’t have been thrilled with it. But I’m sure they’ll be referred to as “the Panthers” now and again, and the fact that they sort of have a nickname in there makes it unique and interesting, and that might get people talking. If you tell your non-lacrosse friends that your team is playing Panther City next weekend, they may ask what that means. Will some of them say “that’s stupid” and come out with a negative view of the NLL? Probably but you can’t avoid that entirely. Others might just think “Huh, that’s interesting”.
When people outside the NLL are talking about the NLL, and it’s not related to a big-name player getting suspended, that’s a good thing.
White privilege
The year was 2016. Dhane Smith had arguably the best offensive season in NLL history. He set a new record with 72 goals, and only a season after Shawn Evans set an NLL record with 130 points (shattering the old record of 116), Smith broke that record with 137. Smith was named league MVP.
Some months after the award announcement, I realized that Smith was probably the first Black player to be named NLL MVP. I checked and indeed he was. I was a little surprised that I had to go look that up, and that none of the press releases or discussion that I’d seen about the award had mentioned that fact. That made me wonder about how many Indigenous players had been named MVP. At the time, the answer to that was two: Jeff Shattler in 2011 and Cody Jamieson in 2014. In 2017, Lyle Thompson brought that number to three. And in all of those cases, all of the talk about those players and the award just dealt with how great a player they were, how good a season they had, and so on. Nothing about their background.
I remember thinking at the time how great it was that in the lacrosse world, Indigenous and Black players can be named MVP and it doesn’t make news. If a Black player had won the Hart trophy in the NHL, how many of the MVP stories would mention the player’s skin colour? I decided it would likely be all of them. How great it was that racism wasn’t a problem in lacrosse.
Damn, was I naïve.
It never even occurred to me at the time that I, as a white man, was the last person who should be claiming that lacrosse doesn’t have a racism problem. How the hell would I know? Without talking to the Black and Native players and getting their perspective, I had no way to know. I hadn’t done that, and yet here I was, proud of the lacrosse community.
A couple of weeks ago, Dhane Smith posted a series of tweets (go read them now if you haven’t already) regarding some of the issues with racism he’s faced in his lacrosse career. People assume he plays basketball or football. People are surprised he plays a “white” sport like lacrosse. (Not only is that racist against Black players, but it also ignores the Native people who invented the damn game and have been playing it since before white men existed in North America.) Other players (and likely spectators too) would throw racial slurs at him; it was a big deal if they got caught but it happened many times when they didn’t. That’s something Smith just had to live with and get used to. It’s insane that this is just a fact of every aspect of life for Smith and very likely every other Black athlete. It’s shameful that I didn’t fully realize that until now.
There was a time, not that long ago, when I thought that being Black was probably very difficult in places like the American south, but things were better elsewhere and not so bad in Canada at all. As a Canadian, I was kinda proud of this, even though I really didn’t have any basis for this opinion other than my own white privilege.
The Black Lives Matter movement has opened my eyes to a lot of the systemic racism that still exists, everywhere. Dhane Smith’s message opened my eyes to the fact that racism still exists in the lacrosse world, and that it was naïve of me not only to assume it doesn’t exist (or “isn’t that bad”), but to assume that I, personally, have any way to really know.
NLL Chatter 