2022-'23 Buffalo Bandits

[Doohicksie]

1 minute ago, Marvin said:

It takes time.  I normally associate lacrosse with Canada and the Canadian border of the US.

Good luck to them.

Fort Worth is a weird city with respect to sports teams.  We're approaching 1 million in population so we should by that measure have some of our own professional sports teams, but we're an hour from Dallas (population 1.3 million but with several large suburbs even if you don't count Fort Worth).  So mostly we're in the Dallas sports orbit.  The fact that the Cowboys and Rangers play in the same county as Fort Worth (in Arlington) is a nod to Fort Worth's influence, but the NLL Panthers and the semi-pro National Premier Soccer League Fort Worth Vaqueros are the only teams branded with and playing in Fort Worth (and the official name of the NLL team doesn't even say Fort Worth; a blunder in my opinion).  The lead sponsor of the Vaqueros, incidentally, is a dive bar made of cinder block 😛

I think a lot of people like the idea of having Fort Worth sports teams but the teams themselves haven't haven't done a very good job of marketing themselves to prospective fans.  I know they're both Pegula owned, but the Bandits seem like they market a lot at Sabres games.  That just doesn't happen with the NLL here.

[matter2003]

46 minutes ago, Doohickie said:

One thing I noticed yesterday is that the Bandits won nearly every faceoff I saw.  They were officially 13/20 but it seemed more dominant than that, especially late.

Yeah, basically he won almost every faceoff, even if the loose ball was picked up eventually by Colorado...the one goal he scored directly off the faceoff win was amazing...

[Taro T]

3 hours ago, PromoTheRobot said:

Meanwhile the Toronto, Hamilton, Mississauga Rock have to relocate to a 5,000 seat area for a few years.

https://www.tsn.ca/lacrosse/toronto-rock-temporarily-move-to-mississauga-as-hamilton-arena-is-renovated-1.1967905

At least Mississauga is an ACTUAL suburb of TO rather than a completely distinct city about an hour away.  It's a MUCH larger Orchard Park to TO's Buffalo.

[Taro T]

2 hours ago, Doohickie said:

One thing I noticed yesterday is that the Bandits won nearly every faceoff I saw.  They were officially 13/20 but it seemed more dominant than that, especially late.

Yeah.  Adler is probably 1 of the 3 best in the league and on occassion has a better game than the other 2 guys would put slightly ahead of him (Irelan and Baptiste).

Winning the vast majority of faceoffs helped the Bandits work the strategy they had for this game.  Rather than going primarily to a fast break game or working the ball to one of their stud shooters (primarily Byrne, Nanticoke, or Smith; secondarily Fraser, Buchanan, Cloutier, or MacKay) for a quick shot the Bandits worked the ball around a LOT and didn't take the bait of the 1st open shot which Ward was well out of his crease to shut down.  The Bandits were patient on offense and worked to good shots.  Even though Ward was stopping the lion's share of them in the 1st half, that plan wore the defenders and also Ward himself out.  He started leaving holes open and the Bandits shooters were able to capitalize.

Patience on offense had a secondary (and even a tertiary) benefit as well.  The 2ndary benefit was that the D were able to stay fresh and after about Colorado's 3rd trip into the offensive zone the Bandits defenders (especially Priolo and Bomberry) were winning the majority of loose balls on the occassions where Colorado was even able to get a legit shot away.  There were a lot of occassions where the fresh D were able to simply keep the Mammoth out of the scoring lanes and with their strength (the Bandits have some big boys on D and working the offensive transition) they were able to shrug off the Colorado attempts at picks.

That 3rd benefit is the Bandits stayed out of the box.  They had 1 PK to kill (and were unsuccessful at, Colorado has a REALLY good PP) and had 1 other coincidental penalty.  That kept Colorado's PP off the floor and Colorado simply didn't have the talent to take it to the Bandits at 5v5.

Went to the opening playoff game vs the Kin-ig-hit Hawks and as impressive as that win was (and the 2 wins over TO Hamilton too) this was far and away their most complete game of the season.

Cudos to Tavares and the rest of the coaching staff for changing the game plan.  They spent the week working on moving the ball around with their backup doing his best Ward imitation coming out high in the crease; and it was successful.  Was complaining about them not changing to this last year against them and also in games 1 and 2 and wifey pointed out that the W's in game 1 of both series likely left them believing they didn't need to change their style of play until it was way too late.  There's probably more than a grain of truth in that observation.

And this is one more Pegula owned team that is consistently one of the best teams in its league.  Should the Sabres ever get there, they should be able to keep it going for a long time.  (And the Sabres seem close to getting there too.)  Though it may take the Pegulas a long time to find the right people to run their teams, once they've found them they do seem to turn them loose to do their thing.

[shrader]

On 6/4/2023 at 10:15 AM, Brawndo said:

The NLL Shop is completely sold out of Bandits Championship Merchandise less than 12 hours after the game ended. 😳

 

Which is interesting as it was all pre-order and none of it has gone into production yet.

I wonder how much they actually plan on producing up front.  I'm sure it's the same number initially regardless of who wins.  They're not planning ahead on some of those attendance discrepancies between teams that were just talked about in here.

[PromoTheRobot]

5 hours ago, shrader said:

I wonder how much they actually plan on producing up front.  I'm sure it's the same number initially regardless of who wins.  They're not planning ahead on some of those attendance discrepancies between teams that were just talked about in here.

NLL.com says a new supply is now in. Shop away.