Random Thoughts: A Strange Night on the Prairies

My random thoughts…

Ever feel like you’re away for the weekend, spending time with your kid, kind of keeping one eye on things, knowing there’s only four games this weekend so what could happen?  And then… yeah, something’s always bound to happen.

Imagine its halftime at your kid’s game, so you open the Colorado game quickly, and sure enough, its the last possession, tie game, and Colorado has the ball.  I’m thinking to myself, guaranteed Zed is the target for this play and somebody better have a stick all over him.  And then sure enough, Zeddy Ballgame.  And before I could even type it, its already on the group chat twice.

ZED.
WILLIAMS.
GAME.
WINNER.#TuskUp pic.twitter.com/ElwSXyqAtX

— Colorado Mammoth (@MammothLax) January 26, 2025

There’s a reason we call him Zeddy Ballgame.  The number of times he’s pulled out the win late in both the NLL and PLL is too numerous to count at this point. 

If you had one shot to win the championship, who do you want to have the ball?  If Zed Williams isn’t on your short list, you need to re-evaluate your list.

A Strange Night in Sask

As I said before, I was away for the weekend and wasn’t in Saskatoon for the game between the Rush and FireWolves.  I was instead in Regina for Vasyli’s soccer tournament.  I’m certain the shock was the same for most everyone as it was for me when the news came out that Frank Scigliano was out for the Rush on Saturday night, that Thomas Kiazyk would make his first NLL start.  Now this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing on the surface.  We know that Scigliano is a better goaltender down the stretch when he has some rest throughout the season.

But to make matters even stranger for the Rush, they aren’t carrying a 3^rd goaltender on their practice roster.  The thought process was that local product Laine Hruska would always be available if they needed him.  The only problem, there is a league rule that if you have two healthy goaltenders at the start of game day, you can’t sign an additional goaltender.  Had the Rush made the roster move the night before, everything would have been fine.  But now this rule was about to bite them.  And I have to say, the rule makes zero sense.  With the amount of flexibility there is in the methods you can add, subtract and shift players between various lists, the fact that you can’t sign a goaltender, especially when there’s a legitimate emergency, is just ridiculous.

Keegan Bell tried out a new position 🤣 pic.twitter.com/yAYcJiOpl3

— Saskatchewan Rush (@SaskRushLAX) January 29, 2025

What do the Rush do?  They opt to dress Keegan Bell as an emergency backup.  Bell’s goaltending experience is limited to minor lacrosse.  But if you wonder why the Rush dressed him, well, their only options were someone that is on their active or practice roster.  Bell is a player that only occasionally makes the active roster.  And as we learned from the Philadelphia Wings several years ago, you can dress one goaltender, but there are possible consequences. 

If you only dress one goaltender, Kiazyk, and he is either injured or is ejected from the game, two things immediately happen to the Rush.  First, by not dressing a backup goaltender, they are assessed a delay of game penalty.  Secondly, the only player they can insert as the replacement goaltender is one of their active 17 runners on the game sheet.  They can’t use a healthy scratch or a practice roster player.  So not only are you losing your starter, you’re losing a runner off your bench to replace him.  By dressing Bell, they can still dress 17 runners in the event that happened.

This brings up the question as to not only how ridiculous the rule is, it brings up an issue of player safety that I wouldn’t be surprised if the NLLPA brings up with the league.  If you look back at the advent of the Emergency Back-Up Goaltender (EBUG) in the NHL, it came from an incident in 2015 where Florida had both of its goalies go down to injury early in the 3^rd period.  The Panthers sent a handful of players back to the dressing room to see if they would even fit the goalie gear before finding out their goaltending coach, Robb Tallas could be signed on the spot to enter the game. 

Almost immediately, the NHLPA raised a significant issue.  They raised a complaint that players, who were not trained to be goaltenders at the NHL level were put in a position where they might have to strap on the pads.  That’s subjecting the player to an unnecessary risk of injury because of that lack of training at the NHL level, and that’s a labour violation in most states and provinces.  Because of this, and multiple other incidents around the same time where teams didn’t know in the hours leading up to game time if they would have a backup, the NHL came up with the EBUG.

I’m not suggesting that the NLL needs an EBUG.  But they do need to give teams the flexibility to address these issues when they arise.  The NHL’s rule before the EBUG was that if in the event that both goaltenders are incapacitated, the team was allowed to dress and play ANY goaltender that was available.  This alone would have resolved the issue on Saturday.

The problem is solved going forward as Hruska has now been added to the practice roster.  Questions were raised as to why he wasn’t added earlier when there was an open practice roster spot.  This is an operational mistake by Keenan for certain as with every active roster, practice roster and IR player the Rush have, they only had 24 players.  Even once Ngyou and Smith return, Acchione and Bell are returned to the PR, the Rush are still roster compliant.

Getting to the game itself, here’s an interesting stat that a Rush fan dug up.  Since moving to Saskatoon, four goaltenders made their first career start, Adam Shute, Cam Dunkerley, Hruska and Kiazyk.  Those four goaltenders are 4-0 in their first career start.  But in the opening five minutes, the Rush were down 4-0 and you started to worry about how bad it was going to get. 

Normally with a barrage that fast, you would take Kiazyk out of the game, allow him to reset and get him back out there.  But with the situation, that wasn’t possible.  Luckily, at 4-0, the Rush threw the challenge flag and that challenge took around 6 minutes to review.  The Rush lost the review, but that extended break, followed by the television timeout at the next whistle, and Kiazyk was able to settle in.  By the time the dust settled in the opening quarter, the Rush had scored on the powerplay, a normal weakness for them this season, plus on a 6 on 5 and the game was tied at 5.  That powerplay unit would end the night 4 of 5.  A critical difference.

Ultimately, the game came down to fourth quarter, where you could expect that Kiazyk would be rattled after giving up two late third quarter goals. But he only allowed one in the last quarter, the Rush transition scored two of the four in the final frame, and the Rush came away with a surprise 17-13 win, on the back of a 10 point night for Robert Church.

For Albany, there has to be concerns.  Doug Jamieson has games like this from time to time, but he wasn’t getting much help from his defence all night.  Sometimes Jamieson can have those hot nights, or even hot seasons and bail them out, but this wasn’t the night.  Albany is now in last place in the standings at 2-6, and realistically need to go 7-3 the rest of the way to make the playoffs, or maybe squeak in going 6-4. But with how bad this defence has been, I don’t think its realistic to expect them to get there.

The award for bravery in this game goes to Ethan Walker who decided to go body to body with Mike Messenger on a transition opportunity, and it did not go well.  Luckily for Walker, Messenger’s goal was wiped out due to a crease violation.  Otherwise, that might have been a highlight that lived on.

One thing to keep an eye on the injury report this week.  Jake Naso went down in the opening quarter and didn’t return.  The Rush were 3 for 6 at the dot with Naso on the floor, and 5 of 27 without him.  Against San Diego, you have the same question as to whether Trevor Baptiste is going to be back.  If one team has their man and the other doesn’t, there will be a lopsided battle.

Follow Up On Last Week

In a follow-up on last week, one reader asked what the stats were like in the PLL under the same microscope.  The PLL has a total of 45 games between the regular season and post season in 2024.  Four games ended in a tie at the dot and no games had a win percentage between 80 and 89%.  Overall, the winning team had a faceoff percentage of 52.5%, slightly lower than the NLL surprisingly.  Broken down by decile:

Faceoff Win %	Overall Record
50.1-59%	4-9
60-69%	10-6
70-79%	5-5
90%+	2-0

When you look at the teams that won despite their opponent going over 60% at the dot, four of the eleven were won by Chaos.  Amongst the teams that lost despite going 605 or better at the dot, four of them involved Redwoods and three involved Whipsnakes.

The 2023 season though was very surprising on the statistics.  The winning team won a measly 41.7% of their faceoffs.  There are some major factors in these stats though.  First, this was the first season where the possession off the faceoff was just 32 seconds.  This eliminated a lot of the advantage the faceoff specialists had.  Secondly, Atlas finished the season 2-8 (2-9 including the playoffs) and won 77% of their draws.  And third, the Waterdogs were terrible at the dot, just 24.4% on average when they won, and they finished 7-3.

There were 46 games in 2023, one of which was tied at the dot.  The breakdown by decile:

Faceoff Win %	Overall Record
50.1-59%	4-9
60-69%	4-5
70-79%	2-4
80-89%	2-7
90%+	3-5

With the reduced shot clock and everyone adjusting, faceoffs didn’t matter in 2023 in the PLL.

Rock Resurgence

You knew the Toronto Rock would be a different team once they started to get their guys back from the IR.  But after a 14-9 dismantling of the Roughnecks in Calgary this weekend, following up an 11-8 win at home against the Rush the previous week, there’s suddenly a lot more attention being paid to the Rock.

A week ago, Jamie Dawick announced on Lacrosse Classified that Mark Matthews’ injury that ended his ironman streak required surgery that was season ending.  The injury was there the entire season, which explains his struggles on the floor, and eventually it was Dawick and Head Coach Matt Sawyer that shut Matthews down.  As much as it’s a loss, Brian Cameron has been a nice diamond in the rough find for the Rock on that lefty side.

If there’s any player that has had the biggest impact since his return, its unquestionably Tom Schreiber.  With 13 points in those two wins, the impact is obvious.  One question that will remain with the Rock, do they opt to bring Challen Rogers out the front gate on a regular basis and continue to play predominantly righty strong sets when that’s where the bulk of the offence has come from?

This win was doubly important for the Rock.  With Calgary currently holding down the last playoff spot, not only do the Rock bring that team closer in, but if tiebreaks matter at the end of the season, its an even more important win that could make the difference in those tiebreaks.

Interestingly, the team holding down the last playoff spot after 9 weeks is Calgary at 3-3.  If the playoffs started today, five of the six teams that would miss the playoffs were playoff teams a year ago, San Diego, Rochester, Halifax, Toronto and Albany.  But the teams on the outside looking in are not that far out of a playoff spot.  Toronto is 1.5 games behind Calgary.  So is Vegas.  Halifax is just 1 game out.  This all despite these teams’ early struggles.  All three need to start to pick up more wins soon as they not only need to leapfrog Calgary, they need to leapfrog San Diego and Rochester as well.  Plus, finishing 8^th isn’t a good prospect to start the playoffs in Banditland.  But it will be an interesting battle to see how it all plays out.

One final note, its Vegas’ Tucker Out Lymphoma night this weekend.  Let’s hope the Desert Dogs’ recent results means another sellout and a lot of money raised for a great cause.

Until next time…