Expanding to Chicago, grounding drones, and it's New York's title to lose. PLL Week 6 Overreactions.

It’s New York’s title to lose

The Atlas are rolling. They’ve won three straight, the second longest win streak in the league behind Denver, and put up 17 goals in two of those three wins. The 17 goal efforts came against Philly and Boston. The currently sit atop the Eastern Conference standings, tied with Philly at 4-2 but they have a +10 score differential. Despite all the talk about the Te-Four-Aton (I am going to make this happen like Gretchen made Fetch happen), New York has the highest scoring attack in the league. They’re the only unit to crack 60 points so far:

Archers: 29 (Fields, O’Keefe, Moore. Ament has 8, King has 15)

Atlas: 61 (Shellenberger, Teat, Dickson)

Cannons: 45 (Nolting, Holman, Mackesy)

Chaos: 33 (Eicher, Hiltz, Charalambides. Scott has 13)

Outlaws: 55 (Kavanagh, O’Neill, Wisnauskas)

Redwoods: 46 (Molloy, Kavanagh, Garnsey)

Waterdogs: 59 (Sowers, McArdle, Taylor)

Whips: 54 (Malone, Carroll, Pannell)

Shellenberger absolutely torched his matchup over the weekend, going for five goals on seven shots. He led the team in touches with 48 and passes in 36, but only turned the ball over twice. The big difference for New York however has been going young at the midfield. They’ve gone to a midfield group of Costabile, Kelleher, Traynor, Bowering, Krevsky, and Stevens in the mix on offense. Costabile, drafted in 2020, is the OLDEST player in that group. Three are rookies, Stevens in year two. But they have serious dodging threats in Costabile and Traynor, a battering ram in Kelleher, an excellent pick player for their lefties like Jeff Teat in Bowering, the group checks all the boxes. They’re as dynamic as it gets. New York is a team built to play any kind of game you want to play. 

The 500 Club is now closed

Kieran McArdle registered his 500th point in spectacular fashion on a no-look feed for an extra man goal. He is the 7th player in pro field lacrosse history to reach the 500 point plateau. He joins Paul Rabil, John Grant Jr, Rob Pannell, Joe Walters, Casey Powell, and Marcus Holman. Everyone on that list is a Hall of Famer, or in the cases of Pannell and Holman will be as soon as they are eligible. The next closest active player is Will Manny at 452, then Eric Law at 442, then Tom Schreiber at 425. Manny and Law aren’t roster regulars anymore, so their chances of making it are slim. Schreiber is 33 years old and averages 31.5 points over the last four years, but is at a slower pace this season. He’d have to stay at that pace and play at least another three years to hit 500. Until the PLL schedule expands, inflating season point totals, the 500 point plateau is unreachable. 

A prolific season from a four attackmen will go unrewarded in 2025

There are two awards an attackman can win at the end of the year. Most Valuable Player and Attackman of the Year. Michael Sowers is current the favorite to win MVP (according to DraftKings), while Connor Shellenberger, Pat Kavanagh, and Jeff Teat all have top five odds. Brennan O’Neill cannot be ignored in this conversation as he found his shooting stroke last week, and TJ Malone would surely be higher in the conversation if the Whips had a better record. That’s six players. Those are the only six players in the league currently at 20 points or better.  Sowers is the league lead with 28. Kavanagh leads the league in total goals with 15. Shellenberger is second in the league in points and shooting 46.7%. Jeff Teat is right behind him. Two of these players will get hardware.  Four won’t. It’s as tight a positional race as we’ve had in the PLL. 

Drones are bad

No need to spend a ton of time here. I will say that the PLL tries to innovate all the time, and on the whole, this is a good thing. Try new things, keep things fresh, keep evolving. If you get stuck in your ways with the same old product for too long, you become baseball; a sport so stuck in its unwritten rules and doing things a certain way because it’s just how you do them that it sucks the opportunities for fun out of the game. Over the weekend in Chicago PLL used a drone for live shots of game action. I personally was just plain unable to watch. I have some medical issues that are aggravated by things like those shots in particular, so I have a built in bias. But the unsteady, shaky, jerky shots of live action did nothing to enhance my viewing experience. It did the opposite, I had to not watch. It’s why this article is late this week; I watched the games on demand later so if a drone shot started I could pause, skip ahead to where it ended, and resume. I know there were suggestions to just look away from drone shots, but I would counter by saying that if a feature of your broadcast causes a portion of the audience to look away, i.e to stop watching the broadcast, it’s probably not a good feature. If PLL finds a way to have the shots be more stable, more natural, more fluid, I’m all for it. Capture footage in games and share it later, edited to be stabilized and a better watch. But the live shots have to go. 

Chicago is good

If the drone attempt at innovation was the bad for the weekend, there was plenty of good to balance it out. The PLL knocked Chicago weekend out of the park. 3v3 lacrosse on a river boat ride was tremendous. A fun way to put lacrosse on display in a city that is seeing the PLL for the first time since 2019. Street Lacrosse returned. The venue for Street Lacrosse this year was the best they’ve had yet, as there was a ton of foot traffic that passed by the court. The crowds were outstanding. Most weeks, the players and coaches pay lip service to the home venue and fans, but this weekend you could hear a sincere measure of thoughtfulness and appreciation when they talked about Chicago. The venue was perfect for a PLL event, fans were loud and engaged, tickets were sold out. At half time of one game, Paul Rabil acknowledged that Chicago would be a short list city when expansion talks happen, and those two days of lacrosse made it perfectly clear why. Expansion is the kind of thing that happens five to seven years down the road, but Chicago made it clear they are ready to support a lacrosse team in the market.