Utah faceoff struggles, the turnover prone PLL ball, and it's Carolina's title to lose. Week 5 PLL Overreactions.

Utah has a faceoff problem

While fans and media often fixate on point production and players competing for spots in an offense, it’s not exactly hard to see that the specialist spots are the most competitive positions in the PLL. Goalies play forever and the league’s current starters look unshakeable in their spots. Faceoff specialist though, is on another level. Faceoff stats in a game are binary. You win or you lose. It’s not like goalie, where both goalies might both have great games and go 60% with a dozen saves. One of those goalies loses, but their individual stats show you they really weren’t all that bad. Faceoff doesn’t work that way. Someone gets a win, someone gets a loss, and over the course of a game you can see what’s what. This can be cruel, because the PLL’s faceoff specialists are the eight best on earth. Scour the globe, you’ll be hard pressed to find more than maybe one or two other specialists who can definitely unseat a current starter. In some respects, what’s going on with Utah can be chalked up to the fact that the competition is just that brutal. But we are not used to see Mike Sisselberger struggle like this. He is currently at 35.6% on the season. The worst season he had at Lehigh as a full time start was 63%, and he went 79.5% as a sophomore. He went 68% in the PLL his rookie year. A number in the 30s is unheard for him. Sisselberger will say all the right things if asked because he’s an excellent teammate. He’ll take all the blame on himself when he loses a faceoff, when he wins he immediately says it’s not just me out there, my wings and teammates are great. But from watching games, Utah has not been good on wings and off the ground this year. Sisselberger is certainly struggling, and his rough first half was capped with 14% outing against Trevor Baptiste over the weekend. But the Utah three man unit needs to improve as whole. Siss has had some clamps followed by messy exits that have become wins for the Archers in the past, but aren’t this year. 

The PLL has a ball problem

I will preface this by offering that I very much like the crew from Pearl. I have a ton of their balls at home, they do an awesome job, I have a bucket of Pearl balls at home that I shoot with my, my kids and I love them. But something is up with the new PLL ball. During the Atlas/Archers game on Friday night, there were a whopping 47 turnovers. That’s an absurd number, and less than half of them were caused. There were basic passes that just sailed out of bounds and other giveaways we just aren’t used to seeing. Post game, I asked about the turnovers, and New York’s Xander Dickson said no excuses, we just need to be better at fundamentals, that kind of thing. But after I mentioned on social media that the game was pretty ugly start to finish, I got some messages from other folks around the league. They told me to looking at the new ball. I’ve now heard from multiple players who have said they just don’t like it. It’s not as grippy as the old ball, it slides out of the stick differently. I have held it in my hands at games before, and it certainly feels a little bit different. Not a “greaser” as the lax lexicon would say, but didn’t necessarily feel brand new either. The sample of feedback I got is not big enough for me to claim “all the players hate the new ball”, but there’s definitely a subset in there who aren’t crazy about it and are still adjusting to the way it handles. 

It’s Carolina’s title to lose

The Chaos showed true grit with a spectacular bounce back win. The Cannons were a team sitting atop some of the power rankings out there. They are a roster that was loaded up with dodging midfielders, well built to attack the Chaos weakness. And yet Carolina round ways to win. Jarrod Neumann handled the Asher Nolting matchup well, turning the MVP finalist into an offball player. Nolting, while improving, is not nearly effective without the ball in his stick. Troy Reh and the Chaos rope unit held Ryan Drenner, Alex Vardaro, Mic Kelly, and Connor Kirst to a combined three goals on 15 shots. Matt Campbell managed four points, including a two, but Blaze Riorden’s 21 saves made the difference. Carolina, as I will continue to say, is almost an entirely new roster. Their top 11 scorers from two years ago are, with one exception who is now on another team, out of the PLL entirely. Rebuilds can happen quickly in the PLL, but this isn’t typical. Rebuilds in the PLL in other years mean a team needs maybe one or two more players, or to bolster a position group, and it makes the bit of difference between winning and losing. Chaos needed a whole new team. Here are the nu,ber of games their top six scorers from Saturday have played with the team:

Owen Hiltz: 2

Sergio Perkovic: 8

Ross Scott: 15

Josh Zawada: 3

Jackson Eicher: 5

Ray Dearth: 3

Other offensive regulars are Adam Charalambides (4 games) and JJ Sillstrop (5 games). Ross Scott is the only one of those names who has a full season with the Chaos under his belt. That’s it. Everyone else is new. When you have this combination of youth (Perkovic and Charalambides are the only two of those players in year three of their career or beyond) and new faces, you’ll get inconsistent play. You’ll get a LOT of learning curves and growing pains. But you’ll also get flashes of what’s possible, glimpses into the future. The Chaos may turn around and struggle again in Chicago after the All Star break, they may also get revenge on the Redwoods from an earlier loss. 

We’ve seen the (second to) last 500 point scorer. 

Marcus Holman scored about midway into the first quarter, and the goal marked his 500th career point. The 500 club is one of the more exclusive in outdoor lacrosse. Holman joins Paul Rabil, John Grant Jr, Rob Pannell, Joe Walters, and Casey Powell as the only players to reach the mark. Kieran McArdle almost certainly reaches the plateau this season, he is currently at 498 points. After that, the next closest active players are Eric Law (442) and Tom Schreiber (422). Even those two reaching it is a long shot. Once McArdle joins Holman, that crew of seven players may be the only players to ever hit the mark. At least for a while. In 2024, there were 10 players in the PLL to score 30 or more points in the regular season. That means a rookie coming into the league would have to average a top ten in scoring level regular season every year for about 16 years to reach 500 points. Maybe a dozen players in PLL history have reached 16 seasons played period, let alone that much production the whole time. Schedule expansion changes the math, but given the number of games and the way the PLL game is structured, 500 points is going to be flatly out of reach for almost everyone. Holman’s achievement is remarkable not just because of the 500, but because of the consistency. His first six years were in the MLL where the numbers are a bit inflated compared to current PLL production. But Holman had one of the best pro seasons of his career in year 11, just two seasons ago in 2023. Even now, in year 13, he isn’t picking up those old player injuries, and he doesn’t look like a player who has lost, or is even beginning to lose, a step in his game. He has defied father time like almost no other player in PLL history.