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.
Category Archives: Opinion
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?
Austin Staats: Enough is enough
The news broke on Wednesday that San Diego Seals forward Austin Staats had been arrested earlier this month and charged with several counts of assault, assault with choking, forcible confinement, and a couple of others. Staats was also arrested for aggravated assault in October of last year, so this isn’t his first offense.
2024 NLL Finals
So that’s a wrap on the 2024 NLL season. The Buffalo Bandits began the season with a loss to the Albany FireWolves and after a mid-season 3-game losing streak (including another loss to the FireWolves), found themselves at 5-6. The Championship repeat looked awfully unlikely at that point. But then things took a major turn, as they went 11-1 over the rest of the season including the playoffs, and by the time they got through semi-finals against the Rock, the Championship repeat looked all but inevitable. The FireWolves put up a solid effort in their incredible turn-around season but by that point, Buffalo was too strong, too confident, and just too good to stop. Congratulations to the 2024 NLL Champion Buffalo Bandits.
2024 NLL Awards
I did not post any predictions for the 2024 NLL awards at the beginning of the season, as I usually do. So instead of going over my predictions and seeing how I did, I’ll go over the players I voted for at the end of the season and see how closely the other voters agreed with me. I’ll add the winner in bold.
2024 NLL Week 21
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.
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.
NLL Chatter 