NLL Stats Evolution 3.0
Updating the 2025-26 NLL Team Stats guide and presenting the new statistics being tracked this season.
Photo Credit: Toronto Rock
Happy NLL Opening Weekend to all who celebrate. Time is a flat circle.
We trod familiar ground to get here. The Buffalo Bandits won the NLL Cup, becoming the second team in NLL history to accomplish a three-peat. Three teams that needed “saving” (for lack of a better word) received it, with the Philadelphia Wings receiving a Tsai lifeline to continue operations for another year, the FireWolves moving from Albany to Oshawa and ensuring I will confuse Ottawa and Oshawa for the foreseeable future, and the Rochester Knighthawks getting new ownership. Two of those saves are awesome and good for the sport and league; one kicks the can down the road.
Beyond that, the offseason was relatively quiet, with CBA negotiations continuing in the background until Toronto Rock Owner and GM Jamie Dawick used Lacrosse Classified to lob incendiary and one-sided warnings about the 2025-26 season probably not happening, which is totally a tactic he didn’t do last offseason.
Sarcasm aside, the parallels between last offseason and this current one are striking. Dawick made the NLL’s issues public again, arguably doing more damage this time. Another superstar is holding out instead of re-signing with his team (two of them this time around). Plenty of players with proven pedigrees don’t have teams this season, albeit this time not due to a team folding. "The Next Major League” slogan needs to die a slow death, especially considering it’s used as an excuse to shield the league from its fifth fiddle status. I still can’t buy Snowbirds merch.
Stop lying to me, NLL.
The longer I cover the NLL, the more it’s all been done before.
But the potential for new shocking actions and developments on the floor keeps bringing us back. The 14 NLL teams are so stacked with talent, veterans spitting in the face of Father Time and a wave of young blood raised on the spectacular and making it ordinary. The Bandits will chase the first four-peat in NLL history, but this is the most human they’ve looked since the pandemic. There’s no better time than now for another team to topple them off their throne.
That excitement motivated me to evolve TyMerLacrosse.com a bit further. With the 2025-26 National Lacrosse League season ahead of us, it’s time to dust off this site for a quick refresher on the stats and to unveil the newest stats I’ll track for this season.
Updates to TyMerLacrosse.com
Off the hop, all the usual data returns; feel free to look at past season stats here. Besides the typical 2025-26 stats updates to reflect the offseason moves across the league, there are two new stat features to the site: Splits and Goalie Saves by Shift Type.
Splits is the term I use to designate left-hand and right-hand shooting. It's pretty simple — now I can tell you how the lefties and righties shot (or were defended against) for their team on any given night and/or a season, and I can tell you that info for any shift type.
It's a straightforward data entry on my end that hopefully helps us in our analysis when trying to see how lefties and righties perform for a team. In seasons past, I would look at individuals' points totals to hazard an educated guess whether lefties or righties were doing well or poorly, a practice I hate and won't have to do any longer thanks to this new data I'll collect. Thanks, me.
I kicked the tires on including efficiencies for lefties/righties but ultimately abandoned the idea. Unless someone ends up sending out five players with the same dominant hand for a shift, it doesn't make sense to say the lefties/righties are more/less efficient on a shift considering both hand types are on the floor at the same time.
Two things to keep in mind with splits:
I plan to account only for a player's dominant hand, regardless of how they shoot. If a player switches hands to shoot but is a lefty, I'm only counting his shot as a lefty shot, not a righty. I do feel like the tendency to switch hands grows every year thanks to the increase of field-first Americans in box, but it's still a rarity in the NLL. No Tom Schreiber for a while makes my life easier (although CJ Kirst this preseason is making up for Tom's absence).
This is position and player agnostic. Nick Rose taking a shot and scoring a goalie goal counts as a right-handed shot and goal, same as it would for Chris Boushy. I do not have the capability to track individual stats for every player.
Goalie Saves by Shift Type is my way of putting the goalies under the microscope, as I know they love being severely scrutinized. I've always kept track of their saves in a game, but I took that the next logical step and broke their saves and goals against by shift type, resulting in a gargantuan doc dedicated to this. I then included the addition of splits to the data, exponentially growing the amount of data being tracked for goalies. This means that if you want to know how Nick Damude handles lefties shooting against him in a typical power play set, I'll be able to provide that information.
Why did I start tracking all of this? Because the Knighthawks play differently in front of Rylan Hartley (better) and Riley Hutchcraft (worse) despite Hutchcraft being the statistically better goalie last season — 11.24 GAA, .791 Sv%, 5.04 GSAA, and 53.8 SA/60 compared to Hartley’s 10.79 GAA, .779 Sv%, -.54 GSAA, and 48.9 SA/60. I want to dig deeper into a goalie’s performance and see whether such roster moves make sense statistically.
If you look at the doc and notice some teams with three or more goalies on their roster currently don’t have all of those players represented, that’s intentional. I’m waiting for them to figure out who will be their backup netminder before adding those players to the document.
Site Refresher
I have (poorly named) Depth Charts available for every team (players are listed alphabetically; I'm not saying who the best/worst players are by position). If you see anything on there that's incorrect - age, hand, contract length, designation (injury, holdout, draft list, etc.) - please let me know. I'm 98% confident what I have is correct, but stuff slips through the cracks. I try to update rosters the same day as moves hit the NLL transactions page.
Most of the stat abbreviations and math I’ve covered before on the site and don’t feel like rehashing here; go view my previous explainer for a quick recap. The logic remains the same; everything on TyMerLacrosse.com can connect like Lego pieces. 5ESG becomes 5-on-5 Even Strength Goals, PPFB is Power Play Fast Break (transition chances while on the man advantage), EALP% is Extra Attacker Lost Possession Percentage, the percentage of extra attacker shifts resulting in no shot (lost possession), so on and so forth.
The shorthand should be terms we're all familiar with, with the only complicated part being True stats, combinations of certain shift types:
TrueES - combined 5ES and 4ES
TruePP - combined PP and PPFB
TrueFB - combined FB, PPFB, and SHFB
TrueSH - combined SH and SHFB
One stat I didn't include in the abbreviations is GSAA, or Goals Saved Above Average. It's a stat that says a goalie saved/let by X amount of goals compared to a league-average goalie. For example, Matt Vinc saved 3.79 more goals than a league-average goalie in the 2024-25 regular season.
One of the reasons I consider goalie saves by shift type such a behemoth is because I went a bit mad and decided to figure out GSAA for every goalie for every shift type and by split. That's going to be quite fun to peruse as we get deeper and deeper into the season.
This stat shorthand isn't info I like to rehash every time I write, which is why I have a quick glossary at the beginning of every stats page that breaks down the relevant abbreviations.
I'll aim to have all the game information updated no later than Tuesday night following a game weekend. Jury's out on whether I'll accomplish this for the 10-game weekend in March. Ten…ten’s a lot.
Final Thoughts
This info and my site are meant to be entirely educational. I'm not seeking compensation for my stats work (money ruins shit), social media or broadcast mentions, etc. One thing I've said publicly before is I refuse to be the least educated person when it comes to box lacrosse, and all this stats nonsense is how I help myself stay afloat in the NLL and strengthen my lax IQ and game coverage.
I also want a smarter fanbase, which is why all of this info is publicly available. A smarter fanbase is a more invested fanbase. Jury's out on whether that wish is being realized.
Two things worth bringing up:
Please don't misappropriate anything on this site as your work. In the age of AI stealing work without permission, accreditation, or compensation, it's unfortunately something I feel I need to bring up.
Feel free to share my site or the stats with anyone you think would be interested in it. I stay off Twitter as much as possible, so part of my strategy to spread the gospel (as it were) relies on word of mouth.
This is simultaneously a cold, emotionless project and twisted human one. I'm not trying to denigrate any team or player, just trying to figure out what is or isn't working for a team. Goalie stats are inherently pointed but not intentionally antagonistic - the numbers are what they are, good or bad.
The twisted human part is related to me. I'm one man trying his best to consistently generate this information without it negatively impacting my day job, personal relationships, or mental/physical health. I'm not helping that goal by handling this all myself, but it's not really fair to ask someone else to do what I do when I have no way to compensate anyone else for that work, and I know all the details and nuances when it comes to shifts and don't feel like having to explain unsettled shifts every time I see one or why I considered what should've been an EA as an ES because the goalie was too slow to get to the bench or go on a tangent about how I don't care whether an ENG is scored on the run or "settled."
Similar to the Depth Charts, something is going to get missed at some point or an NLL broadcast is going to not show the actual game for whatever reason. There are so many moving parts to this monstrous project, but I've done plenty the last two months to hopefully catch and fix all issues.
Reiterating because it's that important to me: I want a smarter fanbase, and I hope my site contributes to that amorphous goal. At a minimum, I hope it's helpful for you and provides insight into your favorite team and the NLL that bolsters your analysis.
Enjoy the 2025-26 NLL season.