Heaved Hasen
Digging into the on-floor issues for the Knighthawks following Head Coach Mike Hasen’s dismissal
Monday’s NLL trade deadline lacked the bombastic panache of a Del Bianco blockbuster trade, but plenty of transactions flew by to keep things interesting. Philadelphia completed their lukewarm firesale while keeping their most exciting pieces, Las Vegas and Halifax swung the biggest deal by trading one of the best player in last year’s Entry Draft for Tyson Bell and a first- and second-round pick, and depth players found new homes.
But the most shattering move on Monday didn’t involve any player; it involved coaches.
Monday afternoon, Knighthawks President and General Manager announced Head Coach Mike Hasen and Assistant Coach Pat O’Toole were relieved of their bench duties. The next day, Rochester announced the hiring of Randy Mearns as their interim head coach.
It’s stunning, politely putting it. Rochester is 5-6 at the two-thirds mark of the 2025-26 NLL season, currently ninth in the standings, 1-5 in their last six contests, and dropped a game to a Roughnecks team that had the second-worst record ahead of week 15. Teams go through funks in a season, and there are five teams behind the Knighthawks, two with just a pair of wins coming into last weekend. How Hasen — with his Hall of Fame record, historic helming of the first NLL three-peat dynasty, and tenure with the Rochester franchises new and old — became the first NLL head coach axed this season is baffling.
Shit’s bad for the KHawks, and Carey clearly felt drastic action was needed.
A two-paragraph dismissal for two cornerstones of the Knighthawks franchise leads me to believe there’s more to this than what’s publicly been revealed, but I hate speculating over gossip on my site, preferring my grapevines in person. I also don’t think there’s much of a point in opining whether Mearns is a good fit for the franchise for six weeks (or longer). His resume, long and full of highs, speaks for itself.
But I do think there are on-floor reasons justifying Carey’s dismissal of Hasen and O’Toole, and that’s what I wanted to dig into today.
Let’s start with the first five games of the season.
The Knighthawks started the 2025-26 campaign with a 4-1 record, bookending a forgettable loss to the Mammoth by taking care of business against the Wings, stonewalling the Seals, and finally beating up the big brother Bandits. The offense averaged 14.2 GF/GAME. the defense allowed 10.2 GA/GAME.
| Shift Type | Goals | S% | SOG% | E% | LP% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TrueES for | 41 | 15.2% | 72.9% | 15.0% | 14.7% |
| TrueES against | 31 | 12.6% | 69.7% | 10.9% | 22.2% |
| TruePP for | 13 | 30.2% | 79.1% | 31.0% | 14.3% |
| TruePP against | 12 | 27.9% | 75.4% | 30.8% | 7.7% |
| TrueFB for | 13 | 23.2% | 75.0% | 21.3% | 9.8% |
| TrueFB against | 8 | 16.7% | 85.4% | 14.3% | 17.9% |
Goaltender Rylan Hartley sustained the flashes of brilliance we’ve seen from him in the past with strong performance after strong performance in his first 247:59 minutes of action, kicking things off with a 60-save effort against the Seals. He posted a 9.92 GAA and 81.4 Sv% through five games.
The offense and its annoyingly named Four Horsemen were dangerous — a TrueESE% of 15.0% is elite. Special teams were a wash more or less, but the transition game, led by Jake Piseno, was an absolute blast.
Then the Knighthawks lost a close contest to the Rock midway through January. Then they played the Warriors over the next two weekends, in which Hartley illegally (according to the NLL’s rules) leveled Steph Charbonneau, Tyler Biles fought Jackson Suboch pregame by the benches, and both were ultimately suspended. Then they couldn’t figure out how to win consistently, their lone victory coming against a Rush team that lost a long overtime the night before, following that up with a forgettable loss to the Roughnecks that saw the Knighthawks down 11-3 at one point.
That six-game stretch was almost the opposite of what Rochester experienced in their first five contests of the 2025-26 campaign. Rochester posted a 9.8 GF/GAME and 13.2 GA/GAME, with Hartley and Riley Hutchcraft splitting time thanks to suspensions to the former. Hartley spent 207:40 min. in cage, posting a 13.29 GAA and .746 Sv%, and Hutchcraft played 158:11 min. with a 12.52 GAA and .723 Sv%.
| Shift Type | Goals | S% | SOG% | E% | LP% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TrueES for | 37 | 12.0% | 72.1% | 11.2% | 16.1% |
| TrueES against | 43 | 14.8% | 64.1% | 12.8% | 21.4% |
| TruePP for | 10 | 16.7% | 76.7% | 17.5% | 8.8% |
| TruePP against | 16 | 26.2% | 72.1% | 27.1% | 8.5% |
| TrueFB for | 8 | 14.3% | 76.8% | 12.7% | 17.5% |
| TrueFB against | 14 | 23.3% | 76.7% | 19.7% | 16.9% |
Obviously, everything got worse, but the penalty kill and transition games weren’t that much different besides more opportunities in transition for opponents. The settled defense got scored on roughly two goals per game more. But that offense settled and on the man-advantage was noticeably worse. This is a clear-cut case where what was the best part of the Knighthawks became its most neutered and ineffective.
That was this season, and anyone that’s been around for a minute should have a nagging thought that’s grown louder the last few minutes. This isn’t the first time the Knighthawks have had a great stretch and a horrible stretch in the same season. In 2024-25, they were 2-4 in the first third of the season (those four losses bookended by the wins), an alternating 3-3 in the middle third, and went on a 5-1 tear in the last third of the season.
The timing discrepancies don’t exactly make this apples to apples — the Knighthawks were fiery at the beginning of this season and end of last season (playoffs notwithstanding) and putrid in their last six contests and beginning of last season — but I did want to examine how they were at their best (from Feb. 22 to April 19, 2025)…
| Shift Type | Goals | S% | SOG% | E% | LP% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TrueES for | 54 | 16.8% | 73.2% | 15.5% | 18.3% |
| TrueES against | 34 | 11.4% | 65.6% | 10.0% | 21.4% |
| TruePP for | 21 | 22.8% | 72.8% | 24.4% | 9.3% |
| TruePP against | 18 | 19.8% | 73.6% | 22.0% | 9.8% |
| TrueFB for | 21 | 24.1% | 82.8% | 22.6% | 10.8% |
| TrueFB against | 14 | 17.1% | 74.4% | 15.4% | 9.9% |
…and at their worst last season (from Nov. 30, 2024 to Jan. 4, 2025).
| Shift Type | Goals | S% | SOG% | E% | LP% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TrueES for | 25 | 11.0% | 68.0% | 10.3% | 21.4% |
| TrueES against | 34 | 13.9% | 69.7% | 13.1% | 18.1% |
| TruePP for | 9 | 9.5% | 69.5% | 11.4% | 5.1% |
| TruePP against | 11 | 13.4% | 64.6% | 15.7% | 5.7% |
| TrueFB for | 5 | 9.4% | 69.8% | 8.9% | 10.7% |
| TrueFB against | 12 | 20.0% | 76.7% | 17.1% | 14.3% |
Part of their turnaround was in between the pipes. Hutchcraft had starting netminder duties at the beginning of the season with Hartley injured, and the former posted an 11.56 GAA and .795 Sv%. Hartley returned to action at the beginning of February, and the defense played better in front of him (I wrote about it around that time). In the final six games of the regular season, he played 365:04 min. and posted a 9.53 GAA and .810 Sv%.
At their best, the Knighthawks 5-on-5 offense was lethal, the power play outpaced the penalty kill, and the transition game couldn’t be mintier if the team bathed in mouthwash. At their worst, the defense again did their job, but that offense couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a boat on the planet Kamino (oh my god, that makes Rochester forwards Storm Troopers, that is unintentionally hilarious on my part. Nerd).
I initially thought this was the same issue as in 2023-24, but that season, where Rochester finished 8-10 and barely squeaked into the playoffs by the skin of their teeth in the final weekend, was a season mired in frustration. They were 6-6 for the first two-thirds of the season, a six-game losing streak smack in the middle of it, then dropped another four straight before a miracle doubleheader winning weekend punched their postseason ticket. They were then bounced in the quarterfinals. I don’t feel a need to cherrypick thirds of seasons there.
The 2022-23 season was similar to the 2024-25 season — hot start, horrendous end. Unfortunately, my stats project wasn’t around back then, so I can’t dive deeply into the numbers. It was more of the same, though, 6-0 start then 3-3 middle and a 1-5 end.
Again, teams go through funks, but Rochester goes through the same funks. Hasen faltered to a 10- record in 2022-23, threaded the needle in 2023-24, navigated a really stanky funk at the beginning of the 2024-25 season before mellowing out then pouring on the pressure late, and finally came out firing on all cylinders this season before realizing that was the load, there’s not much left in the tank.
If Carey felt the Knighthawks’ future would match the middle third of last season or 2022-23, then that probably wouldn’t be good enough to return to the playoffs. It’s not the worst stretch of six games for the new iteration of the Knighthawks under Hasen’s command, but 1-5 that echoed the worst of performances past can’t be ignored, especially after an elite tear matching the best of performances past.
I wanted to wrap this up on a more personal thought.
I’ve had a handful of run-ins with Hasen over the years, dating back to the old Knighthawks days. He was always incredibly gracious and forthcoming with his time and conversation, and I’m thankful for that and his relative candor with his responses through times good and bad.
I don’t dabble in musings regarding firing coaches or general managers. These are livelihoods for a number of people, not particularly well paying ones in the grand scheme of things. People publicly calling for league personnel to lose jobs do not understand the daily ins and outs of professional lacrosse, nor what goes on in a team’s locker room, and I really wish we’d quit interacting with those folks; sportsball is nothing if not an ouroboros of ragebait and shitty uneducated opinions.
It should take extraordinary circumstances to make such a reality happen, and in a league as loyal as the NLL, I really want to stress “extraordinary.”
Hasen is the first coach in NLL history to win three Champion’s Cups in a row, stayed with the city of Rochester after the first franchise left for Halifax, led the bench through the expansion blues, and helmed the team to three consecutive postseason appearances. This season wasn’t going as smoothly as desired, but it kind of never does for Rochester, and we’ll never know if he could’ve course corrected over the team’s last seven games of the season.
Track records should be considered before drastic personnel changes, which is something I hoped to prove a bit here. I’ve seen Hasen navigate teams through difficult waters time and time again, but it’s hard to deny the echoes of this season. With a new ownership group and the NLL field wide open, maybe an aggressive personnel choice is justified, especially if there are reasons in the locker room that validate such a decision.
It doesn’t change the fact Hasen’s dismissal is the most shocking thing I’ve seen all season, and I watched Oshawa blow a four-goal lead with two minutes left in regulation. Two paragraphs for Hasen. Vituperative.
Swarm Head Coach Ed Comeau has often said, “Coaches are hired to get fired,” a quip highlighting the precarity of NLL coaches’ rarified position in the highest level of professional lacrosse. Years and years of success don’t mean much if things go sideways and changes are deemed necessary.
In this particular case, I do think eyes need to be on Carey and what he does for the rest of the season and beyond. This was a drastic move, but clearly one he felt was necessary. Time will tell whether it was correct or not.