All things considered, it hasn’t really been a busy off-season for the NLL. There have been some retirements and some team changes (one will change colours, one will change arenas, and two will vanish entirely). We also had the first NLL Hall of Fame inductees in several years, but there was only one trade and not much else. But the two-team dispersal draft, the opening of free agency, and the entry draft are all within the next two weeks.

ALT: Kitten Raises Paw for Attention

This is Part III of my III-part season in review wrap-up. Part I included awesomes and not awesomes for each team from Buffalo through Oshawa, and Part II included each team from Ottawa through Vancouver. This one is about the league in general. There are more Not Awesome entries here than Awesome but don’t take that to mean that 2026 was anything other than a fantastic season for the NLL.

This is Part II of my season in review wrap-up. I’ve listed at least one awesome thing and at least one not awesome thing about each and every team. Part I included Buffalo through Oshawa, and this one includes Oshawa through Vancouver. Part III, coming soon, will list some awesome and not awesome things about the league in general.

I am trying something new here. Every week during the season, I list all the awesome and not-so-awesome things that happened that week, whether it’s a game, a team, a player, a specific play, a trade, or anything else relating to the NLL. This year, as a season-end wrap-up, I’m going to find at least one thing that was awesome and at least one thing that was not awesome about each team.

I travelled to Halifax this past weekend with my wife and a couple of friends to see game two of the Finals. This was my third time in Halifax in the past three years, but my first Thunderbirds game there. Seeing a game there became a bucket-list thing for me not long after the team arrived there; the atmosphere inside the Nest always looked really exciting and loud, so I was looking forward to seeing just how exciting and loud it could be.

The books are closed on the 2026 NLL season, as the Toronto Rock defeated the Halifax Thunderbirds in the Nest to take game two. The Rock won their seventh Championship, but first since 2011. Challen Rogers was 17 when the Rock last won it all. CJ Kirst was eight. The Thunderbirds lost their first trip to the Finals since 2018 when they were the old Rochester Knighthawks.

Game one of the finals was close, back-and-forth, and exciting with some great goaltending, exceptional defense, and a big comeback. But unlike the quarterfinals, it wasn’t the Halifax Thunderbirds staging the big comeback.

During the semi-finals, I noticed that all of the people listed on San Diego’s “Coaching staff” web page were very high NLL draft picks. I posted that to X and someone suggested that I do that for all the teams. I decided to add some additional information - when they played in the NLL if at all, whether they are in the Hall of Fame, and what awards they had won.

Good news: The Finals are here! We’re this close to determining the 2026 NLL Champion! Bad news: There are at most three games left in the NLL season.

This might be a strange article. One of my favourite podcasts, which is about music and completely unrelated to sports, recently did a series that was really interesting, and I thought that I might be able to apply similar logic to NLL players. I did that and got quite unexpected results.

The unexpected results from round one continued this weekend. The higher-seeded Rock won game one of their battle with the Seals on Friday night, but Sunday saw the Seals battle back to tie the series - with their backup goalie in net, a man who’s seen less than 180 minutes of action this entire season, and only 38 minutes (all last weekend) since early January.

The Rock played their first home playoff game in just over two years on Friday night, and what a game it was. It started off looking like it would be very physical, but that sort of calmed down a bit. But the end-to-end action never did, and literally right to the end of regulation time, it was anybody’s game.

I’m sure that by now you’ve heard about the controversial goal scored in overtime in the San Diego / Colorado game from this past weekend. A minute into the overtime period, Tre Leclaire took a shot, Ward stopped it, Wes Berg picked up the rebound, and passed it to Leclaire who scored. Or did he?

It’s the playoffs! We had four exciting games this past weekend, and of the eight teams who made the playoffs, four of them are out. The crazy thing is that the #1, #2, and #3 seeded teams are all out thanks to getting beat by the #6, #7, and #8 teams. There are an awful lotta brackets that have been destroyed.

The 2026 NLL regular season has come to an end. The standings are final and the playoff bracket is set. You’ve probably seen the matchups in other places but just in case, next weekend we’ll have Vancouver hosting Halifax at 10:00 (all times Eastern) on Friday night, and three games on Saturday: Georgia hosting Buffalo at 7:30 and Colorado hosting San Diego and Saskatchewan hosting Toronto, both at 9:00.

The regular season is almost over and the last two playoff positions are not only down to the wire, but both will be decided in the best way possible: head-to-head.

The playoff picture is almost set, as we now know six of the eight teams that will play in the post-season. Once Halifax beat Rochester, Georgia clinched the fourth spot and the door was open for Toronto and Buffalo to clinch with wins. They both did, and so now we have Ottawa, Las Vegas, Halifax, Rochester, and San Diego playing musical chairs for the last two spots.

A couple more playoff decisions have been made, as Calgary and Oshawa are now out. Nobody else clinched so right now, we’re at three in and three out. We have a 10–5 team (Georgia) and a 6–9 team (Halifax) and with only three weeks left in the season, it’s still possible for Halifax to finish ahead of Georgia. After I scheduled this article but before it got published, we got the worst kind of news about the future of the Philadelphia Wings.

What an incredible weekend of games. Keegan Bal and the Warriors clinched a playoff spot by holding off Jeff Teat and the Black Bears in a meeting of the two top scorers in the league, the Mammoth held off the Roughnecks who were never out of that game, and the Rock beat the already-clinched Rush. And the other three games each featured amazing comebacks including one record-breaking one.

The 2026 trade deadline was this past Monday and once the trades started being announced, it seemed like they just wouldn’t stop. No real blockbusters, but there were a couple of significant deals and a number of smaller trades as well. Las Vegas made a number of moves to improve their team while Philadelphia were clearly sellers. Then there were the seven games on the weekend.

There are players in the NLL who seem to move around almost every year. Callum Crawford and Mat Giles played for 12 teams each, and Ryan Benesch is running out of body space for the tattoos he gets of each team he plays for. But there are others who have played every game of their NLL career with the same franchise.