It’s been a busy off-season so far, and there’s lots more to come. Because we don’t have a CBA for next season, teams aren’t allowed to sign free agents yet though they’re allowed to talk to them. I’m sure many handshake agreements have been made and once we have a new CBA and free agency opens up, all of these deals will be announced. Then we’ll see how much the NLL landscape has really changed.
Until then though, let’s take a look at some of the significant moves made so far.
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.
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.
We are through the first round of 2025 playoff games. Home fans in all four cities were sent home happy as the higher seeds prevailed in each quarterfinal game, and the semifinal matchups are set. The defending champion Buffalo Bandits will take on the unbeaten-in-seven Vancouver Warriors, and the Halifax Thunderbirds, fresh off their first-ever playoff win, will meet the Saskatchewan Rush, fresh off their first playoff win in six years. These series are going to be amazing.
For all you fans of NLL teams that are not in the playoffs, or maybe those of you who want to bet some bucks on the NLL playoffs, here is a handy reference guide for why each playoff team may or may not win the Championship.
That will do it for the 2025 regular season. Seems like just a few weeks ago we were getting ready to start the season and now it’s already over. But of course, the playoffs are an entirely different beast, and even though there are no more than thirteen games left before the long off-season, those games will be the most meaningful ones played all season. There was an awful lot of Awesome this past week, so let’s get into it.
Every year, we see some great performances by backup goaltenders, forced to come into a game early or to make a start because the regular starter is unavailable. I have no stats on this at all (I know, that’s not like me) but it seems to me that there have been a lot of such performances this season.
We’re a little closer to knowing the playoff picture but incredibly, the only thing that was decided this past weekend was that the Rush have clinched a home playoff game. Buffalo and Saskatchewan are now tied for first, with Buffalo holding the tiebreaker, but there are still six other teams (COL, GEO, HFX, ROC, SD, VAN) that could still finish first overall. Four more (ALB, CAL, OTT, TOR) could finish as high as third, and the Wings could finish as high as sixth. Alternatively, any of those teams except Buffalo and Saskatchewan could finish tenth or lower. For example, with only three weeks left in the regular season, the Rock could finish 3rd or 14th.
Just like last year, the playoff race could come down to the very last weekend, or even the very last game, of the season. Once again, unified standings FTW.
Another busy weekend in the NLL with seven games. Blowouts were the name of the game this weekend, as four of the seven games featured a team that led by at least nine goals and three of them led by eleven. To balance things out, we had a one-goal game and a two-goal game, but most of the games were decided well before the fourth quarter even started.
I have more Not Awesomes than Awesomes this week, which is unusual, but even the Not Awesomes aren’t really that bad.
Rock goalie Nick Rose was traded to the Calgary Roughnecks earlier today. I’ll probably talk about that particular trade, as well as any other upcoming trades (several of which are rumoured), in another article later but today we’re going to look at how Rose came to the Rock in the first place.
NLL Chatter 