Expect the unexpected

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The Emperor

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
                                            The Emperor

We are now 3 weeks into the 2012 NLL season, and things are exactly as I predicted. Toronto and Washington are on top, Colorado is struggling to find offense, and the highly touted rookies in Philly, Colorado, and Rochester are showing promise, but will probably need a year or two under their belts to really have an impact.

Or not.

Let’s take a look at what’s going as expected and what’s not.

Expected: The Buffalo Bandits are 2-0. Calgary is 2-1.
Unexpected: Toronto and Washington are combined 0-4. Colorado is 3-0.

Expected: Grant, Prout, Tavares, Shattler, Jamieson, Dickson are in the top 10 in scoring.
Unexpected: There are two rookies in the top 5.

Expected: Mike Thompson has the lowest GAA in the league.
Unexpected: He’s almost two full points ahead of anyone else. Brandon Miller is up around 15.

Expected: A number of players have scored hat-tricks.
Unexpected: Neither Adam Jones nor Kevin Crowley have had a game yet where they haven’t. Two for Crowley, three for Jones.

Expected: John Grant and Gavin Prout make a pretty strong offensive pair.
Unexpected: Both are in the top 3 in scoring, along with rookie teammate Adam Jones. Grant is averaging 10 points per game.

Expected: The rule changes have led to more transition scoring, which might mean more goalie assists.
Unexpected: Mike Poulin has 4 points in 3 games, and Tyler Richards has 3 in 2 games. Poulin is outscoring Stephan Leblanc, Tracey Kelusky, and Jeff Zywicki.

Expected: Colorado will be better than last year, when they had a terrible offense and a great defense.
Unexpected: Colorado has a great offense and a terrible defense.

Expected: Josh Sanderson will have a big impact on Toronto’s offense.
Unexpected: No Toronto Rock players are in the top 20 in scoring. Sanderson is tied for 32nd. Stephan Leblanc is tied for 49th.

Week 3 picks

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I went 2-2 with my week 2 picks, so as week three begins, I’m sitting a game under .500. Let us continue our drive towards mediocrity with this week’s picks:
Record: 2-3 (.400)

Game
Comments
Pick
COL @ EDM Edmonton has had lots of time to prepare for this game, but they have a whole new lineup, and haven’t played together against an actual opponent in over a month (since the scrimmage against Calgary). Meanwhile, Colorado won big last weekend, and I think they’ll ride that wave to a victory over the Rush. Mammoth
WAS @ PHI I think Philadelphia has improved quite a bit this off-season, and I have to say their thrashing at the hands of the Knighthawks last week surprised me. But even if the new and improved Wings play up to their potential, they can’t handle the Stealth. Stealth
BUF @ ROC Using similar logic to the Mammoth pick above, the Knighthawks won big last week, and they will try to ride that wave to another victory – but they’re facing the Bandits who just beat the defending champs, not the Rush who have yet to play. Mikey Thompson will let Messrs. Keogh and Powless know what playing in the NLL is really like, lest they think that last week’s offensive explosion was typical. Bandits
COL @ CAL Can anyone stop the Roughnecks? Sure, with the parity in the league this year, almost anyone can, and if Calgary was playing the night before and Colorado wasn’t, I might pick the Mammoth. But it’s the other way around, so I’m taking the Roughies. Roughnecks

The NLL without Blaine Manning

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Next weekend, the Toronto Rock will play their first game without Blaine Manning in the line-up since the Championship game in 2001, more than ten years ago. Ten years is a long time, so let’s see how the league has changed in that time.

2001 2012
Teams in the league 9 9
The league is considering expanding to Vancouver in the not-too-distant future Yes Yes
The Toronto Rock have been in the last two championship games, winning one of them Yes Yes
John Tavares is a veteran, providing leadership to the Bandits and can still score with the best of them Yes Yes
Number of playoff wins in Philadelphia Wings history 16 16

OK, so things don’t look all that different so far. Maybe we should look at the changes from another angle. Let’s just list some things that have happened in the NLL since the end of the 2001 season:

Teams

  • 3 teams entered the league and are still around: Calgary, Montreal (which became Minnesota), Edmonton
  • 2 teams moved: Washington Power (became Colorado), Albany Attack (became San Jose and then Washington)
  • 2 teams folded: Ottawa, New York Saints
  • 1 team moved and then folded: Columbus (became Arizona)
  • 6 (or 8) teams entered the league and have since folded: Vancouver, New Jersey/Anaheim, Portland, Chicago, New York/Orlando, Boston

Championships

  • Toronto has won four more league Championships
  • Calgary has won two, and singles have been won by Buffalo, Rochester, Colorado, and Washington

Players

  • Someone other than Gary Gait or John Tavares was named league MVP. This had never happened in the first eight years this award was given.
  • Only one of the most recent four MVP winners (Casey Powell) had ever played an NLL game.
  • Players such as Brian Langtry, Taylor Wray, Shawn Nadelen, and Jay Jalbert have entered the league, had a significant impact, and retired (Update: Taylor Wray has not officially retired.)
  • The only players on the 2011 All-Pro teams who were in the league in 2001 were Pat McCready, John Tavares, and Anthony Cosmo
  • The only members of the 2011 All-Star teams who were in the league in 2001 were John Grant, John Tavares, Colin Doyle, Anthony Cosmo, and Bob Watson.
  • In 2001, Mark Steenhuis was 21 and had only been playing lacrosse for four years. Brodie Merrill was 19. Paul Rabil and Ryan Benesch were 15. Rock sophomore player Rob Hellyer was 9.

Blaine, here’s hoping for a speedy recovery and return to the line-up. The Rock, and the league, won’t be the same without you.

Game report: Toronto 10 @ Buffalo 14

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I learned something about myself tonight while watching the Rock-Bandits game (in hi-def on TV, thanks TSN). I learned that I pay far too much attention to my twitter feed when watching lacrosse on TV. I missed more than one goal while reading or composing tweets so perhaps in future I might decide to shut down the ole Twitter app during the game. Apparently the Rock won, or maybe lost, I dunno. Luckily, I PVR’ed the game, so I can go back and watch the whole thing again. Hang on.

OK, so the Rock lost, in a couple of ways. Not only did they lose the game, 14-10 to the Buffalo Bandits, but they lost Blaine Manning early in the game to a broken collarbone. Post-game reports say that he’ll be out 6-8 weeks. Manning is the current Rock “iron man”, not having missed a single game since becoming a member of the Rock in 2002. This means that the next Rock game will be the first the Rock have played without Manning since the Championship game in 2001. Colin Doyle is the league’s Iron Man at 180-something games (and will tie Steve Toll for the all-time NLL record in the next game) but he played three years with San Jose.

Once again, the Rock offense was stagnant. Doyle scored 3 with singles scored by Carey, Billings, and Beirnes, but once again Stephan Leblanc, who has been amazing in his first two years in the league, was nowhere to be found. After two games, he has still yet to score. Dan Carey’s goal in the second came after a very nice behind-the-back pass from Josh Sanderson, but I think Sanderson got it in his head that he’s really good at that, and he attempted a number of behind-the-back passes and shots over the rest of the game. He finished with no goals and 3 assists, so I’ll let you be the judge of how well that turned out. Carey looked a little lost in his first game, but looked pretty good in this one. One of my concerns with Carey because of his concussion history was that he’d be reluctant to get into the corners, digging for loose balls. You can hardly blame him after what’s happened to people like Ken Montour and Merrick Thomson and Sidney Crosby, so it was nice to see him in there working hard for the loosies.

The defense fared almost as well as the offense in terms of goal-scoring. The Rock had four goals from defenders – two from newcomer Bill Greer, and one each from Sandy Chapman and Glen Bryan. Chapman, Stephen Hoar, and Phil Sanderson scored in the first game, so right now Chapman has as many goals (2) as Josh Sanderson (1), Blaine Manning (1), and Stephen Leblanc (0) combined.

I tweeted during the game that the Rock’s practice nets must be a touch bigger than the ones they were using in Buffalo. Shots on net were going high all night long. Maybe there was a scouting report that going high was the way to beat Mike Thompson. Actually, in the game against Calgary, that looked like the way to beat Matt Roik. It didn’t work against Thompson, but then again, not much did. Thompson was outstanding, and stopped more than one shot from point-blank range. In at least one case, the Rock forward was standing just behind the crease line, all by himself, for at least three seconds, trying to decide where to shoot. Three seconds may not seem like much, but when you’re a goalie about to face a shot from that close, three seconds is an eternity. The Rock shooter feinted shooting low, waited for Thompson to drop, and then shot high but Thompson waited him out and make an amazing stop.

In my picks for last week, I called a close game won by the Rock, and I was mostly right. Except that the Rock lost. And it wasn’t all that close at the end. I also said that I didn’t know who was going to score for the Mammoth, who scored 20, though I got the outcome right. And I said that Brodie Merrill and the Wings defense wouldn’t let the Rochester forwards get that many shots on Brandon Miller. I was kind of right there in that they only got 32 shots on Miller, but there was also the 26 shots on Wagar. I got the Calgary game right as well, making me 2-2 on the weekend and 2-3 overall.

Week 2 picks

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As the IL Indoor folks (I’m a newbie over there so I’m not in the “in” crowd yet) and the In Lax We Trust folks always do (and ILWT already have done), here are the week 2 picks for the entire NLL Chatter staff. I picked the Rock to beat Calgary last week, so I’m 0-1 to start the year. I can guarantee you that my average will not go down with this week’s picks:
Record: 0-1 (.000)

Game
Comments
Pick
TOR @ BUF I have to say that I’m not terribly confident with this pick. The Rock players are unhappy with their opening game and will be fired up to prove that they’re still the team to beat. But a healthy Mike Thompson showed last year that he can be as good a goalie as anyone in the league. Wiles and Buchanan will want to prove themselves to their new coach, teammates, and fans as well, and I think Tracey Kelusky will have a much better season than last year. Buffalo is a tough place to play as an opponent, but I’ll go with the Rock in a close one. Rock
MIN @ COL After Grant and Prout, the offensive numbers drop considerably for the Mammoth. Then again, same for Minnesota after Benesch and Crawford. This game features two strong goalies, but Minnesota has lots of rookies on their lineup while Colorado has more established players. Until the Swarm rookies prove themselves, I’ll take the Mammoth. Mammoth
ROC @ PHI I think the addition of Dan Dawson to the Philly offense will be huge, and not just because he’s nine feet tall. This is another battle of great goalies (aren’t they all, though?), but I think the Wings offense can overpower the Rochester defense and get more shots on Vinc than Brodie and the boys will let the Knighthawks get on Miller. Wings
CAL @ WAS TRich is a very good goalie, no question, and was outstanding in the Championship game last year. But in my list of NLL goalies, I’d rank Mike Poulin higher. Calgary are on a high after beating the defending champs in their own barn and I think that will carry over into a Roughnecks win. Roughnecks

Review: NLL.com stats pages

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For the second time in three years, the NLL has changed statistics providers. As a guy who loves stats, most of the time I spend on nll.com is looking over stats. The column I’m going to be writing for ILIndoor.com will be entirely about stats.  I run a lacrosse pool with my friends, and so I’ve written software to download and manipulate the stats. I keep having to change my code to handle changes to the URLs, the formats, which stats are actually included, and so on. Now I need to rewrite them all again to handle the new stuff. But rewriting that stuff is just a one-time inconvenience for me, and at most a handful of other people around the country doing something similar. Once that’s done, are we better off with the new stats provider and pages? Let’s investigate.

You don’t need to know anything about stats to read this article, but it will be quite long and detailed. You have my express written permission to skip it if you don’t care about the stats pages at NLL.com. But if you do skip it, you have to read the next article I post twice. Deal?

This may not be a completely accurate comparison since the old pages are no longer available, so I can’t compare side-by-side. I have to go by what I remember. I’ll also include a list of bugs I’ve found at the bottom.

Individual stats

When you click on “Stats” in the menu at the top, you get a page listing the individual leaders in a number of categories. This is likely what most visitors to the page are looking for, so this makes sense. For each stat, the top player is shown with a little picture, and then the next 4 or 5 in that category. It’s not immediately obvious, but if you want the entire list of a stat rather than just the top 5, you can click on the stat name. This takes you to a page with a list of players and a bunch of stats, and you can sort by any of them. This is fabulous, as it was one thing missing before. You can even sort by a player’s jersey number, though incorrectly.

There is also no legend. I know that PPG is power play goals, FO is face-offs taken, and FOW is face-offs won, but it took me a second to figure out that TO and FT were turnovers and forced turnovers. But if you have face-offs taken and face-offs won, do you really need a separate column for face-offs lost? I suppose you might if you want to sort by that column. The last column is for MVP. I have no idea what that is. My first thought was “are they really allowing you to sort by the number of game MVP awards a player has been given?” I didn’t think “game MVP” was even something the NLL awarded, other than the Championship Game. Whatever it is, it shows up in both the player list and the goalie list, and nobody in the Toronto-Calgary season opener was credited with one. Except that if you go to the game stats, Dane Dobbie got one, so maybe it is game MVP. Seems like a dumb stat to keep track of considering how subjective it is.

Team stats

There’s a page showing team scoring by quarter, which will be very interesting to watch over the season. Despite the fact that neither Colorado nor Minnesota have played yet, they have non-zero values in some columns. Colorado has scored 3 times in the first quarter, once in the second, three times in the third, and none overall.

The power play page (which is just called “Team”) is weird – it lists “Team”, “PP”, and “PP%”. That’s it. Even PPG isn’t there, and no SHG or PK%.

You can click on a team name and it will take you to that team’s page, which is more than just stats. It includes the team’s W-L record;  the team leaders in goals, assists, points, shots, and GAA; quick summary of their latest game; the entire roster (the fact that this includes the practice squad, injured reserve, physically unable to perform, protected, and hold-outs is awesome); some recent stories  about that team; and upcoming games.

The game schedule page is very nice, with a mini-calendar sort of thing across the top (including the words “WIN” or “LOSS” for past games). The box score list shows the final score, period-by-period score, date/time/location, and a link to the detailed boxscore. There’s also a game list page that shows the same stuff minus the boxscore but in a very small font. I don’t know why you’d ever use that page over the boxscore page.

There’s a page for each game as well, though it’s pretty information-free for upcoming games. All times seem to be in EST but are not displayed with time zone indicators. For example, it says that next weekend’s Washington/Calgary game is at “10:30PM”, even though “7:30PM PST” would make more sense.

Game stats

The first word that comes to mind for the individual game page is slick. It’s all Web 2.0-y and slider-y and smooth scrolling-y and stuff like that. There’s a display of the floor with dots where each of the goals were scored from, and you can click on the goals to get who scored it and when. You can do the same for loose balls, shots, shots off target, and faceoffs. I’m not sure how useful it is, but it’s very slick. There’s a play-by-play page, which lists all the “events” (goals, face-offs, loose balls, turnovers, shots, etc.) in the order in which they happened. Finally there’s a Game Stats page with two tabs: Team stats, which lists a bunch of stats and the totals for each team plus a visual indicator of how the teams compare for that particular stat, and Player Stats which lists all the individual stats for each player on each team. All of the PIM (Penalty Minutes) values include a “.0” at the end, though I’ve never heard of penalties being given involving fractions of minutes. (“That illegal cross-check was worse than a minor penalty, but wasn’t bad enough to be a full 5 minute major, so the player will serve a 3.5 minute intermediate penalty.”)

Stuff that’s missing

There needs to be a full menu of all the different stats pages available. If I click on stats, I get a list of the individual leaders. But how do I get from there to the list of all players on one team and their stats? Turns out you go go the Teams menu at the top, not the Stats menu, but this isn’t obvious. Once there, you have to scroll down past stuff like the aggregate number of goals, assists, points, penalty minutes, etc. to get to the player list. The aggregate team stuff is useful, but it’s more likely that the reader wants to see the list of players, so it should be at the top.

If you click on a player’s name, you get a page with his current stats as well as a menu of previous seasons, with game-by-game level stats. This is nice, but should not be the default. Having one single list with one row per season is absolutely essential. Without it, comparing different seasons is much harder and spotting anomalies is essentially impossible.

Very high on my nice-to-have list, but probably priority zero on the NLL’s list: an XML interface to the entire statistics database. Close second: an XML interface to this year’s player stats. Man, would that make my life easier.

Bugs

To the NLL.com developer who is reading this: I am using Chrome on Windows.

  • When sorting the list of players by jersey number, it’s doing an alphanumeric sort rather than numeric. 3 should not come between 27 and 30.
  • As I said above, listing the player stats shows Dane Dobbie with a 0 in the “MVP” column, but in the game stats for the TOR/CAL game, he has 1.
  • On the player stats page, there are two separate lists. They don’t necessarily show the same players, and they’re not sorted by the same thing. When I click on the link to go to page 2, the upper list changes to page 2 but I’m shown the bottom list and have to scroll up to get back to the top.
  • Same page – when I’m on page 2, the link for “Previous” is on top of the link for page 1.
  • Team standings page – Edmonton, Philly, and Rochester are 0-0-0 while everyone else is just 0-0.
  • If you’re not using the latest version of your browser, you’re probably out of luck. Then again, that’s true for many web sites these days anyway. I tried to write a quick blog post on my sister’s computer last week, which is running IE7 (she can’t upgrade because of work restrictions). This ended being totally impossible.

Overall

For me personally, I’m mostly happy with the new site, though there are some missing items and in general it seems to take an extra click or two to get to where you want to be. For your average non-stathead fan who just wants to see who’s leading the league, it’s great. With the old site, you had nll.com and stats.nll.com, and sometimes it was obvious that the page you were looking at was a shell from one site around an ajax page from another site. The new one is much more uniform.

From an aesthetic point of view, the new site looks great. The fancy game page stuff is slick and fairly fast, though I found that page loads were taking quite a while. There are lots of images; almost everywhere you see a team you see a logo, and there are lots of player pictures as well. I suppose it’s possible that these were causing the slow page loads, but they should have been cached pretty quickly so that seems unlikely.

Kudos to the NLL on the new site. Now, if I could please have my XML interface, that’d be great. KTHXBYE.

Game report: Calgary 12 at Toronto 9

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All summer long, Rock fans have been looking forward to seeing the boys back in action, watching for (a) some solid defence in front of (b) new goaltender Matt Roik, and (c) one of the most potent offenses in the league. In the wise words of the sage known as Mr. Loaf, two outta three ain’t bad. The defense was indeed solid and Roik played very well, but after  the first quarter the offense struggled mightily, as the Rock blew 5-0 and 6-1 leads losing to the Calgary Roughnecks 12-9.

The first quarter was all Rock, as Garrett Billings scored the first goal of the 2012 NLL season 2:24 into the first and Josh Sanderson scored less than a minute later. Two goals, two points for Josh Sanderson. A couple of transition goals by Chapman and Hoar and a power play goal from Beirnes with 5 seconds left, combined with a shutout at the other end, and the Rock were up 5-0 after one. Life is good for Rock fans. Calgary seemed disorganized and were dropping passes left and right (my friend Mike said it looked like they had “the yips”), and Mike Poulin was not sharp at all. Matt Roik wasn’t really tested until about ten minutes in (most of the saves he made before that were fairly routine), but made some pretty nice stops after that. I think Calgary also hit three posts and a crossbar in the first quarter alone.

When the second quarter started, Cory Conway finally got things going for the Roughnecks less than 30 seconds in, but shortly after that Blaine Manning answered and the five-goal lead was restored. Nine scoreless minutes followed before the Roughnecks got a couple to drop the margin to three, and the first half ended with a 6-3 Rock lead.

Just as the first quarter was all Rock, the second half was all Roughnecks. They certainly got rid of the yips – actually, I believe they had them sent down the hall to the other dressing room at halftime. By 3½ minutes into the third quarter, the Rock lead had vanished, and three minutes after that, the Roughnecks scored their first go-ahead goal of the night. Toronto didn’t score their seventh goal until 8½ minutes into the third, over 22 minutes after their sixth goal. Phil Sanderson scored to put the Rock ahead again, but Curtis Dickson scored a couple of minutes later to knot it up yet again and the teams finished the third quarter tied at 8.

Calgary broke the tie soon into the fourth as Scott Ranger scored what proved to be the game-winner. Ranger scored another to extend the ‘Necks lead to 2 goals before Dan Carey scored his first as a Rock to get back within one. But the Rock comeback was not to be, as Dane Dobbie scored both his second and third of the night with less than three minutes left. The last was a breakaway on an empty net with twelve seconds left. He was hauled down by a Toronto defender (Bryan?), and immediately awarded an automatic goal.

For the Roughnecks, Dane Dobbie was the top scorer but to me, Shawn Evans was Calgary’s best player. He was his usual self (i.e. a pest), and had a couple of goals and an assist, but he was all over the floor and just making his presence felt by everyone. Evans continues to be the player that other players hate to play against but love to have as a teammate. Mike Poulin wasn’t great in the first quarter at all, but was better in the second quarter and outstanding in the third and fourth. That said, the Rock had less than 40 shots on net.

As for the Rock, the offense struggled from the second quarter on. Leblanc and Carey were invisible most of the night, and Blaine Manning continued his tradition from last year of missing the net seemingly more often than he hit it. Colin Doyle, who has had more assists than goals every season of his career except 2002 and 1998, looked like your stereotypical ball hog, sometimes holding the ball for the majority of the 30 second possession, and then taking a weak or low-percentage shot at the last second. Maybe that’s the fault of his teammates for not getting open and available to pass to, or maybe we should credit the strong Calgary defense for not making such passes available. Regardless, the Rock’s offense just couldn’t get it done.

Matt Roik’s Rock debut didn’t end the way he wanted it to, I’m sure, but that wasn’t his fault. He faced 50+ shots, allowed only 11 goals, and made some excellent stops that kept the Rock in the game. I don’t remember seeing a Calgary goal and thinking “Oh, he really should have had that one”. Andrew McKay of Yahoo! Sports nicely summed it up this way: “Here’s who hated Roik’s opening game: The Minnesota Swarm.” And likely Anthony Cosmo as well.

As I always do in my game reports, I’ve added in some random notes from the game:

  • Dear Roughnecks players: please stand still during the national anthem. This has been one of my pet peeves for years – athletes who walk or bounce around during the anthems. Two or three Roughnecks hadn’t even arrived on the floor until after the anthem had started (Dobbie and Ranger, maybe others). Dobbie didn’t seem to respect the anthem at all; he did the fist bumps down the line, then  bumped into the far boards, walked around a bit, jumped up and down a bit, he never stopped moving once. Now, I get that these guys are pumped and ready to play and there’s lots of adrenaline flowing and all that, but the rest of the players were able to control themselves. Lots of players were stepping from foot to foot, but Dobbie was the only one who left the line.
  • Newcomers Bill Greer and Bruce Codd were both scratches, while Jesse Gamble (who Troy Cordingley had previously said was not going to play) was in the lineup.
  • The “Toronto Rock Cheerleaders” went with much skimpier outfits than previous years, and now have a much shorter name. I believe they used to be known as the “Molson Canadian Bud Light Toronto Rock Dance Pack of Anaheim brought to you by Labatts Blue”.
  • In the second quarter, both goaltenders were called to the ref’s booth to have their pads measured. Never seen that mid-game before. I didn’t notice if any players had their sticks measured during the game.
  • The announcer should be shot for calling some saves as “Denial, Matty style”. The “denial” thing should have been exclusively for Whipper.
  • Another thing I’d never seen before – a shot went over the net, bounced off the boards, and ended up right behind the net. No, that wasn’t the thing I’d never seen before. This was: Roik dove on top of the net, scooped up the ball, and then just lay there as the net fell forwards (i.e. towards centre). Roik rode it backwards back to his feet, then turned around and continued play. Smooooooth.
  • There were two goal reviews called by coaches (the maximum now allowed), and both involved goals by Phil Sanderson. One he got, one he didn’t. The one he didn’t should have been a no-brainer – he shot the ball and then fell into the crease. From the replay it looked like he landed a good two or three seconds before the ball went in. I don’t know why the challenge took so long.
  • For the first time that I can remember, the Rock left the floor after the handshakes without doing their lap around the floor acknowledging the fans.

Week 1 picks

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Quick post, which I meant to write earlier but never had a chance. This season, I plan on posting my picks for each game and I’ll keep track of my predictions over the course of the year.

I’m actually leaving for the game soon (going to the Hockey Hall of Fame with my dad beforehand), so I don’t have time for a full game preview. Luckily there’s only one game this weekend, with Calgary playing in Toronto. I predict a Rock victory for the first game of the Matt Roik era in Toronto. I’ll do a full game review tonight after the game.

NLL season is finally upon us! Rejoice, one and all!

The best lacrosse writers in the world… and me

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This coming NLL season, I will be writing for the two best lacrosse blogs in the world! This one (obviously) and now I can announce that I will be joining the staff at ILIndoor.com. I will be writing a weekly column called The Moneyballers every Monday starting on January 16.

ILIndoor.com has some of best-known names in indoor lacrosse, including the aforementioned Teddy Jenner, a former player and current blogger, radio show host, and in-game announcer for the Washington Stealth; Ty Pilson, sports editor for the Calgary Sun and former Tom Borrelli winner (that’s the NLL’s award for the best writer of the year); Brian Shanahan, another former NLL player who has done colour for many lacrosse TV broadcasts (and yes, he’s Brendan’s brother); Marty O’Neill, the former GM of the Minnesota Swarm; and other great writers like Bob Chavez, Stephen Stamp and Casey Vock.

The Moneyballers will be a weekly look at the clutch players in the league from a statistical point of view. We have a system that assigns points to players for goals and assists that either tie a game or put their team ahead. Goals later in the game count for more than goals earlier, and OT goals count the most. Each week, I will tally up the points for that week’s games, and keep track of the league leaders as the season goes on. Here’s a link to last year’s season-ending article.

I am very excited about this opportunity, but very nervous as well. The Moneyballers is a series that has been on ILIndoor.com for a few years, and up to this year, it was written by another legendary lacrosse writer, Paul Tutka. Tutka won three straight Tom Borrelli awards, so that’s a pretty tough act to follow. However, I am up to the challenge. But if you call me on a Sunday evening during NLL season, don’t expect me to answer the phone.

NLL 2012 predictions

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It’s early January, and you know what that means! NLL prediction season has begun! It’s that time of year that we lacrosse bloggers start making their predictions about what’s going to happen in the upcoming year. I’ll take a look at the overall standings and the major awards. I’m not doing playoff predictions right now, I’ll leave that the end of the regular season.

Overall Standings

East

  1. Toronto
  2. Buffalo
  3. Philadelphia
  4. Rochester

Toronto won the Championship last year with a strong offense, which only got stronger with the addition of Dan Carey and Josh Sanderson. Matt Roik has some pretty big shoes to fill, but as I said in my NLL East division preview, he doesn’t have to be outstanding for the Rock to be successful. Buffalo had some off-years from Kelusky, Steenhuis, and Tavares in 2011, so if they can rebound and Thompson is healthy, they will give the Rock a run for their money. Philly improved substantially with Dawson and Merrill, and I think Rochester’s young guys might need a year before they are a strong team, but look out for them next season.

West

  1. Calgary
  2. Washington
  3. Edmonton
  4. Colorado
  5. Minnesota

Calgary added Shawn Evans to an already strong offense, and has all the tools to win the west again. Washington is always dangerous, and Edmonton is likely the most improved team in the league. Colorado got better where they were strong (defense) and weaker where they were weak (offense), and while Minnesota still has Ryan Benesch, Callum Crawford, and an excellent goaltender tandem, they’re essentially in rebuilding mode.

Major Awards

MVP: Dan Dawson. I think he has the talent to turn Philly’s offense around and win his second MVP title. I also seriously considered Stephan Leblanc.

Goaltender of the Year: Mike Thompson

Defensive Player of the Year: Kyle Rubisch

Transition Player of the Year: Paul Rabil

Rookie of the Year: Kevin Crowley. Not exactly a go-out-on-a-limb pick, but he was chosen first overall for a reason, and will fit in nicely with the other giants on the Philly offense: Dawson and Westervelt.

GM of the Year: Derek Keenan for overhauling the Rush and turning them from last place in the west to serious contender.

Les Bartley Award: Darris Kilgour because he’s been one of the top coaches in the league for a decade and has only won the award once.