Stats Central: Elite scorer vs. committee

From 2018–2020, I wrote a weekly article for IL Indoor called Stats Central. Every week I’d look at various statistics and see what kind of insight we can get from them. All of those articles are listed here.

In 2019, I wrote the article below, where I looked into whether it’s generally better to build your team’s offense around a single superstar player, or to have a more “scoring-by-committee” approach. The conclusion was less than compelling, and so I wrote a different article for that week and shelved this one. I’ve blown the dust off of it, rewritten a bit, and updated the numbers to include the seasons since then.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the Lost Stats Central Article.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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NLL+ revisited

I wrote a bit about the new NLL+ service a little while ago. Most of the information came straight from the NLL press release and a Sports Business Journal article, and there was a bit of speculation on my part. Since then, I was fortunate enough to speak to a couple of people from the NLL to get some more inside information on this new service and how it came about.

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2025 NLL Rule changes

Every year, the NLL makes small modifications to the rule book. Most of the time, these changes are clarifying existing rules or adding slight variations, and every now and again there are fairly major changes or new rules. For the 2025 season, there are no major rule changes. The only one that is likely to affect actual game play is 17.81, which is a change to coaches’ challenges. Here’s a summary of the changes for 2025.

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2025 NLL Week 2

Week 2 is in the books, and now every team has played at least one game. Of the top eight teams in the standings right now, four of them did not make the playoffs last year, including the team at the very top. In fact, the Mammoth went from last in 2024 to first, while the Rock went from #1 in 2024 to last place this year. Yes, it’s only been two games for some teams (and only one for most) so it doesn’t mean much but it’s still surprising.

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Game report: Albany @ Toronto

We have a game between last year’s Champion’s Cup finalist and last year’s first-overall team. We’re expecting a hard-fought close game right? Yes, that’s what we’re expecting but no, that’s not what we got. Instead the powerhouse Albany FireWolves came into Toronto Hamilton Mississauga and destroyed the Rock.

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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.

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