At the end of the 2015 season, I posted a list (Part 1 and Part 2) of my wishes for this past season. As expected, some of my wishes came true while others didn’t. In fact, one of them didn’t (the Edmonton Rush did not stay in Edmonton) but I think things actually turned out better overall than if it had.

So let’s do this again. Some of the wishes that didn’t come true last year will carry over – I’m still hoping for a new hi-def camera setup for Rochester – but I’m not going to list all the wishes again. Again, remember that this is a wish list, not things I think will happen.

Just like last year, it got kinda long so I’m splitting it into two articles.

NLLTV for all games – The league experimented with this new video streaming service in the playoffs this year and I have to say, I was impressed. The feeds were solid, the picture and sound were great, and the games were (mostly) easy to find. The ability to rewind and fast forward the stream, go back 10 seconds with a single button click, play in slow-motion, and then rejoin the game live are invaluable. Best of all, you can watch games after the fact: the next day, a week later, or whatever. This replay ability alone is worth the switch, but given all the other advantages, it’s a no-brainer.

Ideally, this will be available for all games next season for free, but I suspect this will be a pay service. Maybe they’ll give you 3 free games and then you have to start paying, which would help to get new fans interested (or at least it wouldn’t immediately turn them away). Maybe there will be a “season ticket” package for each team, and a “golden ticket” package for those of us who will watch any and all games. I can’t speak for anyone else but as long as it’s not going to cost me $100 for the season and the quality stays high, I’ll pay it.

Expansion – I did mention this last year, but I’m going to list it again. Given the number of NLL-calibre players that did not play in 2016, spent the season on the practice roster, or were cut mid-season, I think the league could definitely support two more teams.

The league has a new commissioner who has been talking about expansion a lot, so I’d be very surprised if we don’t have at least a couple of new teams by 2018, and possibly 2017. Oddly, I haven’t heard any significant rumours of where the league might expand, so Mr. Sakiewicz is playing it pretty close to the vest.

But where to put them…? How about Edmonton and Minnesota, for starters? Both the Rush and Swarm had decent (though not great) crowds but finances were their downfalls. I wrote last year about NHL ownership, and I think an Edmonton team owned by the Oilers and a Minnesota team owned by the Wild would be pretty successful. It might be tough for Edmonton fans to go from the Championship Rush to an expansion team that will probably be terrible for the first couple of years – they’ve already had more than their share of “sucky expansion team” years. Lucky Minnesota fans won’t have to worry about that – the Swarm were never that good anyway. If you want to call that “lucky”.

Other possibilities: the Portland LumberJax failed but not due to low attendance, so with the right ownership, Portland could work. I might consider giving Philadelphia another shot. Boston too, with the right arena deal.

As for new NLL cities, I have no idea. But then again, nobody else does either without having done a ton of market research. Looking solely at population hasn’t worked (right New York? Chicago? Anaheim?), and lacrosse popularity hasn’t worked either (right Baltimore? Albany? Syracuse? Vancouver?). On the other hand, few expected Saskatoon to be successful because it had neither population nor lacrosse popularity. Denver is a big city but I’m not sure the popularity there was expected either. To find the next NLL success story, we need a lot of market research and a little bit of luck.

In his excellent 30-second shot clock column this week, Teddy Jenner mentioned that if the league used points rather than games behind to decide the standings, they’d look a little different. Then he went so far as to say:

Maybe it’s because the league doesn’t have ties that it’s gone with this system but maybe it’s time to go the route of the NHL and give points for wins and maybe even an OTL point.

Over twitter, I expressed my disagreement with this idea and Teddy asked why, and the best I could come up with on the spot was that I didn’t like rewarding teams that lose. If you lose, you lose. You don’t get a partial win for losing in 18 innings, nor do basketball or football teams gain anything for losing in overtime. So why hockey?

Well, we kind of know why: it’s because hockey used to have ties. Once the NHL initiated the shootout, they should have scrapped the points system since there was no longer the possibility of a tie. For unknown reasons they didn’t. But the NLL never had ties in the first place, so a points system makes no sense.

Here are five reasons (in no particular order) why this is a bad idea. This assumes the NHL system: a win gets you 2 points, an OT loss gets you 1, and a regulation loss gets you 0.

1. This kind of points system makes sense if there are wins, ties, and losses. A tie isn’t as good as a win, but better than a loss. But if there are no ties, there are just wins and losses. Why are the points necessary? Teddy says “maybe even an OTL point” – what if you don’t include the OTL point? If you just give two points for a win and nothing for a loss, then you’re just ranking teams by wins. This means that a team that has won more than another team but has also lost more is still ranked higher. In the points system a team that’s 5-4 is ranked ahead of a team that’s 4-3. In the current system, they’d be tied. At the end of the season, it won’t matter but during the season, the points system is less fair.
2. If you lose a game in regulation time, you get 0 points. But if you lose in OT, you get one point. You are rewarded for keeping the score tied for 60 minutes – making it to OT is somehow “less” of a loss. Does a team really need to be rewarded for taking slightly longer to lose? So shouldn’t winning in OT be “less” of a win? It seems that if we’re going this route, we should give 3 points for a regulation win, 2 for an OT win, and 1 for an OT loss.
3. It’s near the end of the season and a team is on the threshold of missing the playoffs. With five minutes left in the fourth quarter, the score is tied. The team realizes that if the 4th quarter ends tied, they get a point. They decide it’s in their best interest to play as defensively as possible, making sure that they get the single point, and then fight over the extra point in OT. As a result, we have play-it-safe boring lacrosse. And what if both teams are in the same situation and desperately need that single point? We end up with the most boring five minutes in lacrosse history as both teams run out the clock and take a token shot every 29 seconds.
4. If you lose a regular season game in OT, three points are awarded. Since the losing team gets one of them, they sort of get 1/3 of a win. What if you lose game 3 of the Championship series in OT? Do you get 1/3 of the Championship? (SPOILER: no)
5. Related to #4, even the NHL doesn’t use this system in the playoffs. If you lose after 15 seconds of OT in the regular season, you get a point. If you lose after 3½ periods of OT in the playoffs, you just lose. Consistency.

The ironic part is that many NLL players talk in interviews and on twitter and such about a win giving them “two points”. That’s how ingrained the NHL is in Canadian culture.

BTW just to clarify the title of this article, I’m not saying Teddy is wrong or hasn’t thought it through. This is just all my opinion. He’s a very knowledgeable guy when it comes to sports in general and knows more about lacrosse than I ever will. I just thought it was a clever pun.

Back in my day, things were simple. You had a goalie who played every day. If he had a bad outing or was sick or something, you put the backup goalie in but the next game, the regular goalie was back. Bob Watson was the man and Anthony Cosmo was his backup. We Rock fans all knew Cosmo was more than capable of being a starter, but he was unquestionably Whipper’s backup at the time. Eliuk was the man in Philly. O’Toole was the man in Rochester. Chugger in Buffalo. Nash in Colorado.

That’s just how it worked, and we liked it.

And then the Minnesota Swarm came along and changed everything.

In 2012, the Swarm started the season with a 20-14 loss to the Mammoth. Longtime Swarm goalie Nick Patterson went the distance and gave up all 20 goals on 50 shots. He was immediately benched and rookie Tyler Carlson started the next game, winning 19-11 over the Bandits. They returned to Carlson for the next two, a 16-14 loss to the Knighthawks and then a 10-9 overtime win over the Rush. Two nights after the Rush victory, the Swarm kept the Knighthawks to only 6 goals with a sparkling debut performance from Evan Kirk. That was when Patterson was released.

After that, the Swarm just kept going back and forth. Carlson, 11 goals against. Then Kirk, only 7 goals against. Carlson again, 11 goals. The Swarm finished the season at 9-7 and lost in the first round of the playoffs. But they had proved that their tandem of rookie goalies had worked: Kirk played all 60 minutes of six games, winning 4 and holding opponents to <10 goals in three of them. Carlson went the distance in seven, winning four. Both finished in the top 10  in GAA and if you remove the “true” backups, they were first and fifth.

Since then, the Swarm has gone with a tandem goalie plan pretty much every season. First Carlson and Kirk, then Carlson and Higgins, and now Higgins and MacDonald. But the idea seems to be catching on.

The Swarm still have Higgins and MacDonald, though MacDonald has played twice as many minutes as Higgins this year. Toronto has Rose and Miller, splitting time about evenly, just like last year. Calgary had Scigliano backing up Poulin a couple of years ago, then that was reversed last year. This year it’s more even. Cosmo is the main guy in Buffalo but they have a ton of confidence in Davide DiRuscio who filled in very well when Cosmo was recently hurt. At 38, Cosmo is the fourth-oldest player in the league, so a tandem going forward may be in the cards in Buffalo.

But not everyone has bought into it. New England has Evan Kirk, Colorado has Dillon Ward, and Rochester has Matt Vinc, and those guys are the unquestionable starters for their teams. Saskatchewan is having no part of this at all. Aaron Bold has more minutes than any other goalie and his backup, Tyler Carlson, has the fewest.

Vancouver is a weird case. They have said on more than one occasion that Eric Penney is their starter and Tyler Richards is the backup, but Richards has played almost 70% of the minutes in the four games since his return. A Richards/Penney tandem would not be surprising the rest of the way in 2016.

Now having said all that, the Minnesota Swarm didn’t invent this idea. It had been done before. In 2007 the Bandits had Steve Dietrich & Mike Thompson, and the next year they had Ken Montour & Thompson. In 2010, the Washington Stealth had Matt Roik & Tyler Richards. Even the Swarm themselves had Matt Disher & Nick Patterson in 2006 and Kevin Croswell & Patterson in 2009. But it really seemed to take off in 2012 once Kirk and Carlson became the two-headed monster for the Swarm.

In some of those older cases, it might have been “play one goalie until he has a crappy outing, then play the other until he blows it” but the tandems we’re seeing now don’t work that way, and maybe that is what the Swarm started. Kirk would allow 6 goals in a game and Carlson would start the next one. The idea of “ride the hot goalie” isn’t what they were doing.

Maybe in a few years, that will be the norm – every team has their pair of goalies and they each start half of the games. It certainly seems to make more sense than having one goalie play every minute of every game and then when he has an off night, the other goalie who’s played zero minutes for half a season is then expected to come in and be effective. But if we ever get to the point where every team is doing this, I suspect it won’t be until after Matt Vinc and Aaron Bold retire.

I’ve watched a lot of lacrosse over the web and on TV during the past several years. I’ve seen games with low quality chunky and choppy feeds, feeds with terrible lag (it’s irritating when you find out about a goal on twitter a full minute before the “live” feed gets there), feeds with video but no audio, feeds with audio but no video, and feeds that just stop. But I’ve also seen games with sparkling, hi-definition, smooth, beautiful video and flawless audio. Much of that is based on the cameras and other video hardware as well as the network hardware and connection, so there isn’t much that can be done short of refitting the arena. You’re not going to get the beautiful hi-def video from the BCA in Rochester because they just don’t have the equipment to do that, whereas the LEC in Langley does – and I’ve seen some gorgeous feeds from the LEC.

But regardless of the actual video and audio quality, producing an NLL broadcast can be either great or terrible depending on the decisions made by the producers. So as a public service, here’s my:

Guy Who Knows Nothing About Sports Video Production’s Guide To Producing Sports Video

DO: Use the mid-floor camera almost all the time. Now and again a lower camera in the corner gives a good view, but not always, and not for very long. And the behind-the-net camera is rarely useful unless it’s way up high.
DON’T: Switch to the lower corner camera every single time the ball is down near the goal.
ALSO DON’T: Install (or ever use) a corner camera that can barely see the net, Mohegan Sun people.

DO: Hire broadcasters who are knowledgeable but not biased, or at least not homers. I’ve said all this before. If the announcer is more excited when his team scores than when the other team scores, that’s fine. But if every time a player on one team is hit, he says “so-and-so is knocked to the ground, no call, …” but he never adds the “no call” when someone on the other team is hit, that irritates me.

DON’T: Broadcast the in-game host. The people in the arena should hear him/her, the people watching the broadcast should not.

DO: Have the broadcasters read my NLL Name Pronunciation Guide.

DO: Show the dance cam, kiss cam, “show us your muscles” cam, or just general shots of the audience when play is not happening. That can be entertaining and fun.
DON’T: Show any of these while play is on. This shouldn’t need to be said but I’ve seen it happen more than once.
ALSO DON’T: Simply show the Jumbotron feed with the “make some noise!” graphics and that sort of thing. Ever.

DO: Hire broadcasters who are familiar with indoor lacrosse. If you get field lacrosse guys, make sure they use the correct terms: there are no “ground balls” (or GBs, Randy Mearns) in indoor lacrosse, they are called “loose balls”. (I’ll give Mearns a bit of a pass because he played in the NLL but he’s also a field coach so he concentrates on field lacrosse these days.) Recently a broadcaster talked about a player having his foot in the “goal circle”. We call it the “crease”.

DO: If you’re showing a replay, make it obvious by putting a “replay” banner or something on the screen. In a recent Black Wolves game, they showed the fancy swooshing NLL graphic that usually precedes and follows replays but then went immediately back to live action. It took me quite a while to stop yelling at the screen “SHOW ME THE GAME” and to realize that they were.
DON’T: Cut to that replay while play is on. Or switch away from live action for a replay of nothing interesting happening as the Black Wolves did in the same game.

DO: Display the score, quarter, and time remaining (and ideally, shot clock) in a narrow bar across the top of the screen or in one corner (top left is my personal preference). If it’s possible, also indicate when a team is on a power play (and how much time is left). Other “nice-to-haves” would be an indication of whether a net is empty and when a delayed penalty is called.
DON’T: Have this graphic take up the top quarter of the screen.

DO: Have the announcers explain some of the weird or lacrosse-specific rules. We understand that not everyone watching is a lacrosse die-hard.
DON’T: Let them anywhere near the microphone if they don’t know these rules. Now and again the refs make a call that seems incomprehensible or incorrect because of some information the announcers don’t have. I get that. But when the broadcaster is baffled on why a penalty shot is awarded when a team already two men down takes another penalty, or wonders why a goal scored with 30 seconds left in the 4th quarter is being reviewed when neither coach asked for it, that’s not helpful to the newbies, annoying to the die-hards who are yelling at their screens, and gives a bad impression of the league – that they would hire broadcasters that don’t know the game.

DO: If you have someone interviewing the players or coaches during breaks in play or at the end of a quarter, have them ask specific questions.
DON’T: Let them take the easy way out and just say “Talk about the play of <Player having a good game>”.
ALSO DON’T: Ask how someone is feeling immediately after an emotional loss, whether it’s in OT, or after a big comeback, or in a playoff game. We all know how they’re feeling and they don’t want to talk about it.
DO: Interview Alexis Buque after he wins.