NLL Player Rankings: Coming Soon
Lyle Thompson (Photo: Kyle Hess/Georgia Swarm)
After the National Lacrosse League’s Week 5 (Dec. 30-Jan. 2), The Lax Mag will publish our first NLL Player Rankings, highlighting the Top 25 players who have had the greatest impact during the 2021/22 season.
The tracking of this season’s most valuable has already started.
At the conclusion of every weekend, TLM will rank the top six players for each team from that weekend’s game or games (double headers). Players will be selected and ranked in order of the impact they had in that specific game(s). A player ranked first will receive six points, a player selected in the second spot will be awarded five, three gets four, four three, five two, and sixth gets a single.
Unlike the more involved criteria we used for the NLL Top 100 (see it here, fifth paragraph), our NLL Player Rankings are about what a player does in that game and eventually for a full season. Out of the four or five bullets we used for The 100, the only one that applies here is “positional impact & overall value they provide their team” in that specific game and then stretched over the regular season.
Curtis Dickson (Photo: Ben Green)
We don’t care what someone did in the playoffs five years ago. We don’t care if they were drafted first overall or played for Peterborough. We definitely don’t care what they do in the summer. We don’t care if he’s your absolute favourite player and you think he’ll be better next game. We don’t care if you shared a pop (or more) with them post game.
It’s about right now. That’s it.
Reputations have ruled the NLL for many years. Players are often praised for who they are, not what they’ve done lately or, for the purposes of these NLL Player Rankings, right now. End-of-season awards are, sometimes, voted for based on relationships rather than that regular season’s results.
We’ll be applying the same criteria to every position when we select our six from each team in all of their games: forward, defense, transition and goalie.
Each week, we’ll add that past weekend’s points to our total tally in order to determine this season’s top players through this best-of list. If a player had an outstanding weekend and doesn’t appear on that next week’s rankings, well, they probably haven’t had a strong enough season to support them being Top 25.
We’re tracking the best, not one-week blips.
So, when the league starts back up in 2022 after their Christmas break (GTFO Omicron!), TLM will post our first NLL Player Rankings, and keep going weekly until the league’s last game, currently scheduled for April 30th.
Don’t like who’ll eventually land?
Go to our social channels (see icons below). We showed you ours, now you show us yours. Just remember, we don’t care what player’s DMs you landed in. It’s another item that doesn’t factor into our scoring system.