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.
Category Archives: Rochester Knighthawks
2025 NLL Week 21
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.
Is 2025 the year of the backup goaltender?
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.
2025 NLL Week 18
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.
2025 NLL Week 16
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.
Trade revisited: Rose to the Rock
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.
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 6
A light but impactful week in the NLL. There were only three games but one of them got rid of one of the two remaining winless teams (Las Vegas, only Toronto remans), another got rid of one of the two remaining undefeated teams (Georgia, only Buffalo remains), and the third set or tied a handful of NLL records.
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.