By Budd Bailey
Friday night’s lacrosse game between the Buffalo Bandits and the Saskatchewan Rush raised an interesting rhetorical question.
Can the defending champion of the National Lacrosse League have a “must-win” game with a third of the schedule left to play?
It certainly might qualify for that classification. After all, the Bandits had lost their previous three games to slump to 5-6 on the season. If Buffalo had lost on Friday, it would have been 5-7 with a home game coming up next week against Toronto …. followed by a finish of four of the last five on the road.
We won’t know if a loss would have sent the Bandits spiraling into the abyss. That’s because they figured out a way to beat the Rush, 15-14 in overtime.
“I’ve got to give credit to our team for ending the three-game losing streak,” Buffalo coach John Tavares. “We just couldn’t seem to pull away. But we stuck in there and battled. It was a nice to see a full, 60-minute game.”
How close was this game? By one statistical standard, it was the closest game in the modern era of the league. There were 14 ties along the way, as neither team ever had more than a one-goal lead. On only four occasions did a team score twice in a row. The “lacrosse is a game of runs” quote received the night off from the postgame news conference.
“It was a hard-fought game; it was one of those games that finally fell for us,” Dhane Smith of the Bandits said. “Last year we had a lot of close games, and we were winning those games. This year we were losing them. It’s easy to get down on each other, and it’s been a tough stretch. So it was nice to get this one.”
The night’s final hero turned out to be Tehoka Nanticoke. The last goal came in a rather innocent situation. The Buffalo offense was setting up a play when Nanticoke pushed away defender Ryan Barnable to create a little space in the slot. Josh Byrne found him with a pass, and Nanticoke’s one-timer found the net at 5:22 of the extra session.
“Tehoka is very sneaky playing down low,,” Tavares said about the shot that gave Nanticoke four goals for the night. “He does a good job of creeping up in the middle, and it was just a catch and quick stick – a nice catch and shoot. It’s hard for a goalie to read that.”
There were plenty of other heroes, naturally. Byrne finished with four goals and seven assists for 11 points. One of the goals was a ridiculous catch-spin-shoot play that was downright astonishing. Byrne would have been justified to turn to the crowd and ask, “Are you entertained?”
Speaking of highlight-video goals, Chris Cloutier had a pair of them as part of a hat trick. Even Smith, who had three goals and seven assists, was left impressed by the flamboyant nature of his teammates’ goals.
“That was awesome to see,” he said. “Some nights, the ball is going to go in. It’s really cool to see. If the ball goes in the net, great. … You have to keep contributing.”
Matt Vinc was back in the nets for Buffalo after recovering from a finger injury. He was all right in the first 60 minutes, and then turned up his game in overtime like the best goalies often do.
Finally, there was the story of Connor Farrell. The Bandits had been awful times terrible at faceoffs this season, and needed some help.
“I watched the videos, and I always wanted to come play for an organization like this, with a fanbase that’s unreal,” said Farrell, was a faceoff man in outdoor lacrosse. “Once I had surgery from the outdoor season, I was cleared in early February, I started emailing (General Manager Steve Dietrich) and said, I’m your man, I’m ready to go. This is the only team I wanted to play for.”
Farrell won his first faceoff, drawing applause from the passionate Bandits’ audience. It got better from there. Farrell finished 27 of 33 in faceoff wins, with many of them coming in crucial situations down the stretch.
“I felt the pressure,” he said. “I definitely needed to win those.”
Tavares added, “That makes a huge difference when you are trying to stop a run by getting possession, or by start a run by getting the ball back. When you’re down by one, you need the ball to score. It’s nice to have that.”
Farrell’s arrival also meant one less thing to do for Swiss army knife Ian MacKay, who could worry about playing offense and defense at different times of the game.
By the way, Robert Church had the proverbial “sock trick” for Saskatchewan with six goals. Teammate Ryan Keenan added seven points
The win put the Bandits in a three-way tie for sixth in the NLL standings. The playoff race was something of a muddle after Friday’s game. Buffalo is one of nine teams with either three or four wins. No matter what a team’s past might indicate, it’s the present that will matter as we reach the final third of the season.
“You’ve got to look at it once game at a time. You can’t look past that,” Tavares said. “You start thinking about the next opponent, you’ll get in trouble. We control our own destiny.”
“We have a huge game next week against Toronto, and we’re excited about the challenge,” Smith added.
(Follow Budd on X.com via @WDX2BB)
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