NLL Insider

It was a wild weekend in the difficult-to-predict world of the NLL. Normally, you would think that playing on your home turf would give you some advantage.

Apparently not. Only three home teams (Minnesota, Philadelphia and Colorado) managed to come away with victories in an eight-game slate.

With the first two games of the season being split (Chicago losing at home and Colorado winning), that makes it six visiting-team wins and only four home-team wins to date (two of those by Colorado). What’s the reason?

A number of things, I suppose. First and foremost — and this is a very good thing for the league — is parity.

 

Every team seems to have some guys up front who can score on the best defenses, some guys who defend well and good goaltending. The twelve teams in the league are all well-balanced. That’s partially due to the dispersal of the Arizona and Boston players. Most teams got to fill some glaring holes with proven NLL starters from the dispersal draft.

There are other reasons though, including the number of distractions faced by the home-team players every weekend. In many cases, a large contingent of the home team flies into their city either the night before or the day of their home game. Assuming there are no flight or ground transportation issues, there’s still practice to attend, a morning shoot-around, hotel beds, roommates, restaurant meals, media appearances, promotions, friends, family and ticket requests to deal with. It leaves little time to physically and mentally prepare for the game itself. Hence, sometimes it’s a little easier to be the visitor as they don’t have quite as many of those distractions.

And gone are the days when the opposing fans could mentally and, in some old small-town Canadian barns, even physically try to intimidate the opposition. Now, the louder they’re yelling at you means the more they’re worried about you. No longer, it seems, can you expect a one- or two-goal edge simply by being the home team. That’s not to say a big home crowd urging on their team can’t help. It can and does. But those other factors tend to level the playing field, meaning the home team always has to work every bit as hard as the visitors to get the win.

Other notes:

It’s a fine line between success and disaster in this league. The Toronto Rock is the latest victim of this fact after their weekend implosion. Just two minutes away from a sloppy yet useful victory (and 2-0 season start) over the Swarm, two inexcusable penalties precipitate a stream of calamitous events that carried over not only in the corridors after the game, but also into Minnesota on Saturday night. Even the classy Jim Veltman (with two of the Rock’s dismal four-goal total) couldn’t lift the Rock out of their despair on Saturday. A season-defining moment? We’ll hear more shortly.

Kudos to long-time Calgary Roughnecks Operations and Public Relations man Mitch Redshaw for spearheading the Roughies’ weekend charity promo for breast cancer awareness. Even Stealth coaches Walt Christianson and Art Webster supported the worthy cause by wearing pink.

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