Overview:
Evan Schemenauer is a Saskatoon based NLL writer. Random thoughts is a weekly column which outlines a wide variety of thoughts that Evan has on the NLL and lacrosse world! All versions of the column can be found here: https://lacrosseculturedaily.com/author/evan-schemenauer/
Note: The opinions in this column are Evan's personal thoughts. They do not reflect the opinions of other members of the LC Daily Staff.
My random thoughts…
There’s a lot we can start with from last week’s NLL action, but let’s start 2024 on a positive: the attendance in NLL arenas this past weekend. Pre-Christmas is always a tough sell for the NLL. People are busy shopping, making preparations, and attending Christmas parties.
The weekend following Christmas traditional fares better as workers take holidays, kids have the week off, and you’re looking for something to do. The numbers of the past don’t lie, which is why we saw seven games this past weekend.
Buffalo was north of 17,000. Sask, Toronto, Calgary, Colorado and Halifax were all north of 9,000. San Diego who has struggled saw an uptick. High attendance anytime is good for everyone, and let’s hope the trend continues for the next 5 months.
Pulling a Vancouver
“Vancouvered” is a verb, meaning to continuously lose games where you held a large lead to the shock and dismay of your fan base.
There should be a cardinal rule that you never turn a game off at half time that is a rout, especially if Vancouver is playing in that game. We’ve seen this team blow so many huge leads over the years. And sure enough, even with Curt Malawsky as the head coach, Vancouver “Vancouvered” themselves in a 12-11 overtime loss to the Mammoth Saturday night. The Warriors scored 5 goals on 5 shots to start the game, temporarily chased Dillon Ward, only to get a sixth on him upon his return and Tyler Carlson had to go in for permanent relief.
You could excuse me for following up on last week’s article questioning whether Ward has fully healed, and that is still a question, but it would have been the crux of my analysis of this game. At one stage, Kevin Crowley had 5 goals on 6 shots and looked unstoppable.
Just before half, Robert Hope sat back and tried to be a goalie instead of defending Adam Charalambides who was near the crease, giving Charalambides time to score. Carlson couldn’t stem the tide in the first half too much and it was 11-5 Warriors at the half, on just 25 shots. Dan MacRae said in a halftime interview the defence needed to stop being screens that the Warriors could just shoot around, and he was exactly right.
And then halftime happened…. Sound familiar?
For those new to the game, let’s rewind about one year. Vancouver is in Vegas, up 12-4 at the half. Vegas was already down two men. Then two fights broke out after the buzzer at halftime. The Warriors were starting the 2nd half with a penalty shot, plus a 5 on 3, with the second man short in the box for seven minutes.
Vegas still had not won a game as a franchise at this point and this should have been over with given both guys involved in the fight were ejected. But the penalty shot was saved. The Warriors fail to score on the 7-minute power play and in fact give up a shorty. Then the wheels completely fall off after that as Vegas comes all the way back to win 15-14.
Not convincing enough? Go back to the 2022 season where Vancouver leads Colorado 10-4 just before halftime, 13-6 at one point in the second half, and loses in OT. Even worse, earlier in the 2022 season, Vancouver took a 10-2 lead 37 seconds into the second quarter. Ward had already been chased. I’m trying to remember who it was on Twitter that made the prediction that Colorado was still going to win this game. By halftime the lead was cut to 12-10 and Colorado would go on to win 18-15.
This isn’t even an exhaustive list. Why this keeps happening to the Warriors/Stealth, I can’t fully comprehend. It happened four times in the last two years, including three times against the Mammoth.
This time it all starts with a 4 goal Colorado run in just 1:17 halfway through the third quarter to bring the Mammoth within two. But then a senseless cross-checking major to Connor Robinson with five minutes to go in the third quarter should have been a momentum killer.
Not only did Vancouver not score, but the best scoring opportunities over that 5 minutes belonged to the Mammoth and the momentum swung back to the Mammoth.
In the last 34+ minutes of the game, Vancouver only had 15 shots, including what I’m being told was a dismal four SOG in the fourth quarter. But even then, the law of averages says that Tyler Calrson should have allowed 3-4 goals in that second half. Vancouver wouldn’t score once. Its not the longest a team has ever gone without scoring a goal, but that doesn’t make things any easier.
Then it appeared that the Colorado comeback was all for not when Keegan Bal scored in overtime on a crease dive, just seconds after Carlson stopped a 2 on 0. Then the review went on for a while. But Ian Garrison overruled the call on the floor.
The still photo shows that Bal’s glove does touch the turf before the ball crosses the line. If Bal had face planted, the goal would have counted, but who thinks about faceplanting for that extra split second in that situation?
After that, it was pretty much fate that Connor Robinson would end things a few minutes later.
I truly feel sorry for Vancouver’s fan base. This happens to them over and over again. They’re in year 10 of the rebuild. Perhaps they’re closer to that rebuild being complete than ever before, but the losses don’t help.
Let’s not undervalue the performance of Carlson here in that second half. Getting to know Hot Carl when he played in Saskatchewan, he’s one of those guys that I always want to see play well in the few opportunities he gets to play. He’s had a number of these brilliant relief performances.
His save on the 2 on 0 at the most critical of times was fabulous. Perhaps when you don’t get to play much, but you have the most positive attitude on the team and you’re working the hardest in practice, these results come when you get the chance. There’s a reason for years we’ve referred to Carlson as a Big Team Guy, perhaps the biggest in the league.
The Unlikely Leader
I was excited to go to the SaskTel Centre on Sunday night to see what was going to be a hard game to predict ahead of time. Pat Gregoire mentioned that he is interested to see what happens to Albany once teams had more game tape of them to watch.
Well, the Rush had 3 games of game tape and two weeks to figure it out, and still Albany took it to the Rush early, at one stage taking a 9-4 lead.
Albany was a fun team to watch live. You gain a whole lot of perspective watching them this way because its easier to watch what’s happening off ball. The offense was very unpredictable and you didn’t see the same attack happening repeatedly. But Albany knew what they needed to do. Get your hands free in the middle of the floor and shoot low. All but one of Albany’s goals were scored low.
Frank Scigliano is taking a different approach to his positioning this season. In the past he would realize shooters were going to try to beat him low, that he would go down so often, you beat him firing it just under the crossbar.
Frank doesn’t go down that much this season, but it exposes him low. He’s also had a number of slow starts which is similar to what was happening to him last year. Once he gets in a groove, he’s lights out and that’s what happened in the second half to get the Rush back in the game. Not going down so much will hopefully allow him to play more minutes.
In this game, the Rush had the most success on defence when they got physical with the undersized Albany offence. They’ll have to repeat this next game when they play Philly and Mitch Jones that is so dangerous in close.
The biggest issue in my mind for the Rush is at the face off dot. Simply put, they need a FOGO. At this point, the Rush are 16% off the draw. They’re creating a situation in most games where their opponent is getting 20+ additional possessions because they can’t win a draw. Given, facing Joe Nardella is tough for anyone on any given night.
Derek Keenan has always been reluctant to have a FOGO, and there is a point to that. If you have a FOGO, you shorten your defensive bench to nine guys and someone has to head out for back to back shifts.
But this can’t continue. When overtime began, you knew that Albany was going to get the opening possession, even though the Rush almost chased the face off down. The Rush never had an offensive possession in overtime, and in the end that decided everything.
Whether there is a face-off specialist out there that has box lacrosse experience, I can’t think of anyone. If you go the PLL route like several teams have, the best option out there is Nick Rowlett.
As for Albany, if they keep mixing up their offensive game plan, and Dougie plays well enough to keep them in games, this is an Albany team that will be in the playoffs, if not hosting an opening round playoff game. If they don’t continue to mix things up, teams will eventually catch onto them. But for now, enjoy the ride that is this unexpected run.
The PLL Schedule
I noticed that when the PLL released its schedule on New Years Day that it confused people, especially when the PLL went the way of having a home city for each team. Perhaps an explanation of the PLL’s business model is needed to show why and how this all happened.
Let’s go back to the league’s foundations. When the Rabil’s put this league together, they realized a multitude of problems that the MLL was having. To make the PLL somewhat financially viable, they needed to accomplish two things.
One was to get attendance and other forms of revenue up. The second was to cut overhead costs so the players could earn more. The touring model was designed to accomplish both of these at the same time.
On the revenue side, one of the downfalls of the MLL was that in a traditional home-based team model, you’re asking fans to commit to going to 6 or 7 home games, on the weekend, in the summer. That model in itself is flawed because even core lacrosse fans can’t commit to that in the summer.
The purpose of the touring model was that you would only have to commit to one weekend of the year, you would know well in advance what weekend that was, and you could plan accordingly. Plus, you would have the opportunity to see almost all the best players in the league that weekend instead of seeing just two teams.
By focusing on that one market for that one weekend, you concentrate the fan base in that market and boost the attendance. No, the PLL isn’t playing to a sold-out Foxboro Stadium, but the attendance is better than the typical 1000 fans they were drawing in most of their markets.
On the overhead side of things, if you’re booking hotels, buses, catering and the like for 7 or 8 teams as opposed to two teams, the cost per player decreases significantly.
You also lease one stadium per weekend instead of four. You need one officiating crew instead of four, which goes along with their travel costs decreasing as a whole. You need one set of ticket sales staff, one set of off-field support staff. You need one set of executive management instead of eight.
To go back to a model where these teams were playing half their schedule at home would increase overhead costs significantly, and that’s not the intention here. In fact, with the new model they’ve developed, overhead costs decrease by approximately 10% most weekends because you’re absorbing the travel costs for 7 teams instead of 8 when you have a home market weekend.
When your team plays in its home market, that team is playing twice that weekend, once on each day, and one team will have a bye week. The hope is by having “home teams”, and that home team plays each day, it will drive up ticket and merchandise sales on those 8 weekends where you’re in a “home market” because the local market will feel more tied to that team, even though they only play at home twice the entire season.
Plus, true to one of the revenue bases for the league, you will still get to see almost every top player in the league every weekend because 7 of the 8 teams will play in each of the weekends hosted by a “home team.”
It may confuse fans, but for now this model is the most financially sound model they have.
Coming Up…
Four games are up on the NLL schedule this week. Albany hosts Halifax in a game where the Firewolves come into the game as an underdog for the 5th time this season, and if they win this, we have to stop looking at them as the underdog.
Panther City goes to Georgia in a game where Panther City was the only team with a bye week last week, but is on a two game losing streak they need to snap. Buffalo hosts Colorado in what is a battle between the two finalists the last two years, but with all of the injuries the Mammoth are suffering from, a win in Buffalo would be a complete shock.
And New York travels to Philly where Philly is looking to stay hot after its comeback win against Halifax, playing a Riptide team that needs an identity win.
And we can normally guarantee that at least one of those teams will have me eating my words, that’s the unpredictability of the NLL.
Until next time…