Buffalo Bandits And Toronto Rock Face Off In Eastern Conference Showdown

It was roughly a year ago when I last wrote something here and it happened to be the shellacking that the Bandits handed to the Knighthawks and Rock. Fast forward to now and the Bandits are having the roles reversed on them.

The Toronto Rock come into town with their Eastern Conference leading 4-1 record and their defeat of the Philadelphia Wings 19-11 last night. The Rock are lead by captain Colin Doyle who came back to the Rock after the San Jose Stealth moved to Washington. Doyle has been a key member of a Rock team that was rebuilt after not making the playoffs last season. In the win over the Wings, Doyle had seven points while the Rock took it to the Wings early with 11 goals in the first half. Doyle is now two points away from becoming the third ever player to score 1,000 points in the NLL.

The Bandits are trying to find a semblance of their domination that they have had over the league in the past few years. Their 1-4 record has been severely disappointing for the team and the changes that have been made in the past couple of weeks have changed the dynamics of the team. Their first win was last week over the Minnesota Swarm, 11-7, and they are looking to build off that win. One of the big disappointments for the Bandits have been the lack of offense in their game. Scoring 9 goals/game, which is the lowest total in the league, is not going to win any games and the offense needs to step up. The loss of John Tavares for the start of the season at this point has not helped production, but there are a handful of great shooters on this team that need to find the net.

Game time is 7:30 pm and can be heard on 1520 AM and seen on nll.com

Bandits Clip the Wings for the First Time

In a night where the small things didn't see all that right, someone forgot to turn out the lights during the opening, the opening just being a little off, the in game host being out, and on a personal note the mustard dispenser spraying all over the place instead of my hot dog. Normally when those things start to go wrong the whole game starts to go to hell. And in the first 7:25 it looked like it was going to be. Philly started the game on a 5-1 run, scoring 2 in the first :29 seconds. Then the skies started to part. The Bandits went on 12-3 run and never looked back. The Bandits ended up wiping the floor with a tired and undisciplined Philly Wings 21-12. The main scorers from the Bandits are Steenhuis and Smith, who is officially listed for 3 but really scored 4. What really killed the Wings were the undisciplined penalties that happened including 5 illegal substitutions, a bad slashing penalty from Blasdell. The Bandits capitalized on these by going 9 for 13 on the powerplay. The Wings did have league leading Iannucci score 4 including 2 in the first 2 minutes. But the defense really locked in on him and shut him down. When someone scores 30% of a teams goals, the rest really dont have the firepower.

The star of the game was Ken Montour though. He replaced started Mike Thompson who allowed four goals on eight shots. Montour then just stopped almost everything that was put in front of him, not showing any effects of the concussion he suffered. Montour allowed 8 goals on 49 shots, stopping 26 of 29 in the second half. If he has not earned the starting spot after tonight's game, I'm not sure if he ever will have the starting spot.

The Bandits will face the Minnesota Swarm again at HSBC Arena next Saturday while the Wings face Toronto in the Wachovia Center.

Bandits/Wings Review

20 seconds. Thats all it took for this game to be decided. 20 seconds, one faceoff, one timeout, and one shot. The Bandits lost on Saturday night 15-14 in overtime. Jake Bergey scored the game winning goal 20 seconds into overtime. Overall, the Bandits played what looked to be well, coming back from 13-10 to start the 4th to eventually take the lead and take the game to overtime. Mark Steenhuis and Kevin Dostie led the team with 4 goals a piece while John Tavares scored 2 and Clay Hill, Dan Teat, Cory Bomberry, and Roger Vise each scored one. Mike Thompson started and played all 60:20 letting in 15 goals on 52 shots. Brandon Francis played in the place of Kyle Schmelzle and went an uninspiring 8-34 on faceoffs.

On the Wings side, Jake Bergey scored the game winning goal and he and Athan Iannucci led the team with 4 goals a piece. Geoff Snider and Jamie Rooney each scored 2 and Merrick Thompson, Dan Marohl, and Taylor Wray each scored 1. Rob Blasdell started and played the whole 60:20 letting in 14 goals on 62 shots. Geoff Snider took the majority of the faceoffs going 21-28.

All in all, this Philadelphia Wings team is a very good team and looks to be the team in the East to beat. They set the tone early, scoring within the first 5 seconds, and often, relenting the lead only three times. They do have some speed and that showed with the early goals in the first quarter and overtime. They also have a good amount of shooters. If this team is going to be beat, it most likely will come on the road since the Wings have yet to be road tested. They play 6 of their last 7 games on the road. Right now though, this team seems to have all the pieces in place to make a run deep into the Champion Cup Playoffs.

Bandits/Wings Preview

The Buffalo Bandits head into Philly on Saturday night to take on the red hot Philadelphia Wings. This Philadelphia Wing team looks to be extremely dangerous this season because they have a lot of firepower coming from a bunch of sources led by Athan Iannucci. He has 10 goals in 2 games and 14 points total. He has a supporting cast of Jake Bergey (8-5-13), Merrick Thompson (7-5-12), and former Bandit Jason Crosbie (1-8-9). This team really is looking to be the team to stop in the Eastern Conference after they knocked off the Knighthawks 15-14 last week. They had 13-7 lead going into the 4th on the high powered Knighthawks and still held on to win the game. This team looks dangerous in the Wachovia Center and that is where the Bandits are headed.

Coming off his historical night last Saturday, John Tavares looks to keep this team on the winning track. He (6-11) and Mark Steenhuis (8-9) lead the team with 17 points a piece. While the scoring of these two isn't the major concern, its which players would step into the supporting cast after the injuries to Sean Greenhalgh and Brett Bucktooth. Kevin Dostie has stepped into that role quite nicely. He has 6 goals on the season, including his hat trick against New York last week. Roger Vise and Delby Powless have also contributed but they tend to be a little streaky with all of Vise 4 goals this season coming in the second game against the Knighthawks.

The main question mark of this game is going to be the goaltending of Mike Thompson. While he looked extremely shaky in the first game against the Knighthawks, he settled down in the second game. Against the Titans, he let in 13 goals on 46 shots, many of those coming while the Bandits were on the penalty kill. The play of Thompson is going to ultimately determine the outcome of this game. The Wings have a lot more weapons than the Titans did and whether or not Thompson can handle those is whether or not the Bandits can pull out a win. The other issue with this Bandit team is the penalties. They ended up taking 67 penalty minutes against the Titans including 5 major penalties. This put the Titans on the power play 15 times. If the Bandits have any chance of winning they have to keep out of the penalty box because the Wings can be dangerous going 12 for 27 in their two games.