Back in August, I wrote part I of the off-season report, covering the trades and stuff that had happened at the time. There were a couple of situations that had yet to be resolved, namely those regarding the Panther City franchise and Christian Del Bianco’s status. After lots of rumours about relocating, the league and ..read more

Last week, the NLL held a dispersal draft for the Panther City Lacrosse Club, where each of the other 14 teams selected players from the PCLC roster (or list of draft picks). This was the first dispersal draft in the NLL since 2011, but for a while before that, they were a regular thing as ..read more

The news broke on Wednesday that San Diego Seals forward Austin Staats had been arrested earlier this month and charged with several counts of assault, assault with choking, forcible confinement, and a couple of others. Staats was also arrested for aggravated assault in October of last year, so this isn’t his first offense. Staats is ..read more

A number of interesting moves have been made since the Bandits locked up the 2024 Championship back in May. Here are the trades that have been announced, as well as a bit about the movement of the start of free agency. There have been no free agent signings because of that, but there was one ..read more

So that’s a wrap on the 2024 NLL season. The Buffalo Bandits began the season with a loss to the Albany FireWolves and after a mid-season 3-game losing streak (including another loss to the FireWolves), found themselves at 5-6. The Championship repeat looked awfully unlikely at that point. But then things took a major turn, as they went 11-1 over the rest of the season including the playoffs, and by the time they got through semi-finals against the Rock, the Championship repeat looked all but inevitable. The FireWolves put up a solid effort in their incredible turn-around season but by that po ..read more

Both the semi-final series had Game one last Friday, which I wrote about here. Sunday featured Game two of each, with Albany hosting the Seals and Buffalo hosting the Rock. The visiting teams won the Friday night games, so in order for either series to continue to game three, we needed the visiting teams to do the same on Sunday. But it was not to be. Seals vs. FireWolves, Game 2 Games one and two in this series looked fairly similar. The FireWolves defense was very frustrating for San Diego as we saw a number of Seals offensive players running off the floor shaking their heads, trying to figu ..read more

Instead of the usual Awesome / Not Awesome format, I’m doing this just as mini (or not so mini) game reports. Since my Bandits @ Rock report was quite long, and then the game two reports got long as well, I split the semi-finals up into two articles, one for the Game Ones (Games One?) and one for the Game Twos. Bandits vs Rock, Game 1 As a Rock fan, I can’t say this game was great. Not the game itself, not the noisy Bandits fans, not the final result, nothing, really. Even the traffic getting there wasn’t great. Well, Nick Rose was pretty good, and the Rock defense as a whole wasn’t bad, but c ..read more

Typically in the playoffs we see lots of excitement, lots of jubilation, and lots of heartbreak. The first weekend of the 2024 NLL playoffs delivered on all counts. I mean, it would be nice to see less heartbreak, but every team worked extremely hard over the last five months to get to the playoffs and since half of the teams are going to see their season end in the first round, heartbreak is not really something that can be avoided. Awesome Close games ROC @ TOR: Veteran goalie holds opposing team under 10 goals for the win, while the young up-and-coming goalie on the other team also plays a ..read more

It was like watching The Usual Suspects or No Way Out for the first time – what an ending! Many of the questions we all had about playoff positioning were answered on Friday and Saturday, but the final playoff decision came down to the very last game of the season. You can’t ask for better drama and excitement than that. Awesome Rochester beats the odds Rochester entered the final weekend making the playoffs in just over 3% of the remaining scenarios. They needed to win both of their games and get help in three other games, and they got it. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the Knig ..read more

There is only one week left in the 2024 regular season, and every team has exactly one game left except Rochester, who has two. There are still two playoff spots up for grabs, and five teams (Panther City, Vancouver, Saskatchewan, New York, and Rochester, in descending order of likelihood) trying to get one of them. There are eight games next weekend, and even the very last one (Philly at Rochester, Sunday at 3pm EDT) could have playoff implications; there are scenarios where Rochester gets the last playoff spot if they win that game, and Vancouver gets it otherwise. Talk about down to the wir ..read more