Put It in Reverse, TBirds | Face-Off FAFO
An historic pair of games from the Halifax Thunderbirds and weekend filled with goals scored off the draw
Photo Credit: Trevor MacMillan/Halifax Thunderbirds
Week 11 of the 2024-25 National Lacrosse League regular season was an interesting one despite its brevity. All the road teams won, Brennan O’Neill scored one of the two best goals this season so far (1a or 1b with Sam Firth’s no-look nutmeg of Nick Rose around two defenders, take your pick), and the 5-3 Calgary Roughnecks reminded me of a lesson I keep having to relearn — never bet against the Calgary Roughnecks; they always find a way to win, my prognostications be damned.
Two things really jumped out to me from last weekend, though, and I figured they’d be worth diving a bit more into: The Thunderbirds learned how to putt, and the Wings didn’t catch the FOG bug.
Photo Credit: H. Barry/Philadelphia Wings
Put It in Reverse, TBirds
I was reviewing the data from HFXvsPHI and saw a stat that made me do a triple take, message some media colleagues of mine to verify, and do another double take for good measure. The Halifax Thunderbirds netted 8 transition goals in their win against the Philadelphia Wings.
Stop and let that marinate for a bit — 8 fast break goals. In <a> game.
“That can’t be right,” I muttered to myself after seeing it, poring over the gamesheet. “Eight in a game’s impossible.” But nope, the Thunderbirds stepped on the gas so hard they punched through the floor of Christine and pulverized the Wings in transition like they were Buddy Repperton in his Camaro.
The mind-boggling doesn’t stop there. The Thunderbirds posted a TrueFBE% of 44.4% (league average is almost a third of that) and a TrueFBLP% of 22.2%. A bit under a fourth of their transition opportunities resulted in no shot, and they cashed in on nearly half of their transition shifts anyways. It was a relentless run game from Halifax, but it didn’t just come out of nowhere.
The Thunderbirds had another big transition weekend on Jan. 31 against the Warriors, scoring 5 FBG against Vancouver. Not a possession was lost, and the Nest Protectors finished the game with a 38.5 TrueFBE%. Math that up between the pair of contests, and it’s 13 transition goals in two games with a 41.9 TrueFBE%.
Here are all of the NLL teams the last three seasons to score 8 transition goals in a game:
Halifax Thunderbirds
Here are all of the NLL teams the last three seasons that scored 13 transition goals over a pair of consecutive contests:
Halifax Thunderbirds
The previous high for transition goals scored over a consecutive two-game span was the 12 goals the Saskatchewan Rush put up in their 0-2 start to their 2023-24 campaign, one of those games funnily enough against the Thunderbirds. After that was the Calgary Roughnecks with 11 early in Feb. 2023 (I’ll note the 2022-23 NLL season was this project’s infancy, and I did a shit job by not separating shorthanded markers scored deeper into a shift from transition shorthanded markers, something I rectified starting last season).
Halifax has always been good at running. Before that Jan. 31 contest against the Warriors, they had 15 FBG in 6 games and a TrueFBE% of 19.0%. But then Tommy Lee Jones told Ryan Terefenko to hit the little red button, and the Thunderbirds have been blasting through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel upside down while listening to Elvis. It’s a bananalands weapon for a Thunderbirds team that already boasts one of the more dangerous settled offenses in the NLL this season and are getting consistent goaltending.
I’m a big fan of research projects where I know the answer ahead of time — “Has an NLL team scored that many transition goals in a game or consecutive games?” Nope. Simple and clean.
Photo Credit: Ryan McCullough/Toronto Rock
Face-Off FAFO
I could’ve used the same photo of Jake Withers above this section, as well, and it would’ve been completely appropriate.
If you’ve read my work for the past few years, you’re probably aware I don’t particularly care about face-offs. I “track” them (i.e., go with whatever the NLL says are the numbers) and use them to determine how often a team wins the draw game and wins the actual game (58.3% this season, slightly up from last season’s 55.6%). But as far as thinking they are so important to an NLL game that it’s worth having a dedicated face-off specialist and cutting into your bench’s depth in a sport where possessions are fast and fleeting, I can’t go for that (no can do).
Solid depth on the bench is more important than losing a position player to a guy that wins a clamp, passes the ball, and spends the next few minutes on the bench watching the lion’s share of the game being played before doing the whole thing all over again. If you lose the draw, make the defensive stop and get the ball back.
My philosophy regarding NLL face-offs was formed by my time at the Swarm, who were never the bee’s knees when it came to winning the draw game. They proved to me year in and out that winning a face-off was a wash if the team managed to stop the possession. Getting scored against off an opponent’s face-off win, however, was a no-no and an indicator of your team being lax and letting opponents take advantage of a screwy situation before a full offense and defense are out there. If you fuck-around post-draw, you’re gonna find out.
There are arguments — good ones! — that winning more face-offs does wonders for a team, as Rochester Knighthawks head coach Mike Hasen and defenseman Taylor Jensen spoke with me about following their win against the Swarm earlier this year. More and more NLL teams are shifting towards that philosophy of having a FOGO — the Bandits do with Connor Farrell, and the aforementioned KHawks added Mike Sisselberger (I’ll note it’s rare for these guys to stick around long-term in the NLL). There are more examples of guys originally brought in to be FOGOs in the NLL learning box defense and turning themselves into solid NLL defensemen — Joe Nardella, TD Ierlan, Trevor Baptiste.
But how those players impact a game at the dot tends to rely on the eye test and expert intuition to describe how they’ve improved a team’s fortunes; we don’t really have publicly available statistics that show the weight of winning a face-off, how each win or loss tips the scales for and against, and face-off statistics are barely more useful than goalie wins and losses because of that lack of stats. I for sure don’t have them, just not smurt enough.
Well, kinda smurt enough — I can count gooder. I started tracking goals scored on the very first shift following a face-off win in the 2023-24 season, curious to see how often teams were making the most of those wins. I’ve never really dug into the numbers too deeply — burnout’s a hell of a drug — but I always have it in the back of my mind who’s really good at capitalizing off their draw success (Halifax) and who’s not (Las Vegas).
This is a lot of amble to get to the point: An epidemic of face-off goals were scored in week 11, as seven of eight teams found the back of the net immediately after winning a draw. Plenty of teams fucked around and subsequently found out.
Goals scored off the draw were slightly down pre-week 11. Teams only scored on 10.1% of their shifts immediately following a win, down from last season’s 10.9%. But then 23 FOG were scored across four games, 19 on settled shifts and just 4 scored with players running pell mell towards the cage. It bumped the season percentage up to 10.8%
The two teams that were the best at it were the Roughnecks and Swarm, each with 5 FOESG (face-off even strength goals). The Roughnecks won; the Swarm lost. Of the four teams that won their respective games, only half of them outscored their opponent in FOG.
I do think that the San Diego Seals’ 3 FOG were impactful in their win against the Rock, as two of them came immediately after the Rock scored and prevented them from going on runs. Their last one was the dagger, part of a one-two combo that tied the game up before knocking the Rock back on their asses.
Not everyone in week 11 got in on the face-off-scoring fun. The only asymptomatic club? The Philadelphia Wings, who won three draws all game. They, ah, they had other issues to contend with in that game, as described above.