We saw a few significant trades this past week, notably two huge ones involving the Toronto Rock as well as another significant one involving the Wings and Desert Dogs. Then on Saturday, the Seals and FireWolves made a deal. The Toronto trades look like they’ve given up on the season and have begun the rebuild, but it may not be as bad as that. The Wings have massively improved their defense, the Seals and Rock get picks for the future, and the Desert Dogs and FireWolves both get some more firepower up front.
Category Archives: Philadelphia Wings
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.
2025 NLL Week 11
It was Week of the Rookies in the NLL. One of the most anticipated rookies this year made his debut on the weekend, another highly anticipated rookie (and a teammate of the first one) scored one of the best goals of the year, and yet another rookie had his second strong offensive outing in a row. I guess some non-rookies did good things too.
2025 NLL Week 9
A light week in the NLL with only four games but it was another exciting week with no shortage of stories.
2025 NLL Week 8
What a wild weekend! We had lacrosse being discussed on the most popular podcast in the world, every team played a game and a couple played two, a sellout in the desert, close games, comebacks, a blowout that turned into less of a blowout, the last winless team winning, and the second NLL broadcast in a language other than English.
2025 NLL Week 7
An incredible week of games starting with one of the best rivalries in the game, despite the results in recent years (Buffalo has won 11 of the past 12 matchups with the Rock since 2022). As I mention below, every game was a comeback to some extent but some were significant comebacks. Halifax/Rochester was as close as a game can be, to the point where we still don’t really know who won it.
2025 NLL Week 5
How can we already be talking about Week 5 in the past tense? The season just started, didn’t it? We still have two undefeated teams and two winless teams. In addition, all the games for the 2024 calendar year are now done which means that my talking about the 2025 NLL season as being in progress will sound less like time-travelling. The league does refer to it as the 2024–2025 season, just like the last one was the 2023–2024 season, but I just use the higher number because it’s shorter and a greater percentage of the season will happen in 2025.
2025 NLL Week 4
The NLL standings this season look like what you’d get if you hit the “randomize” button on last year’s standings. Of the top six teams, four of them didn’t make the playoffs last year. Of the bottom five, four of them did. And then there’s Buffalo, and then there’s Las Vegas. Nice to have some consistency, I guess.
2025 NLL Week 3
Wow, what a week in the NLL! Close games, overtime, blowouts, records set and reset, milestones hit… so much awesome. There’s a lot to get to so here we go.
2025 NLL Week 1
We’re back! The NLL is back, NLLStats.com is back, NLL podcasts are back (though some like Lax Class never left), and of course NLL Chatter is back. Every week I cover things that were awesome from the previous week and things that were… less awesome. Let’s jump right in.
NLL Chatter 