NLL Player Rankings: Sock-Trick Edition

After the first several weeks of the 2023-24 National Lacrosse League season are complete, The Lax Mag will publish a weekly NLL Player Ranking, examining the league’s Top 30 players from Week 1 right up until the end of the regular season.

TLM’s Top 30 NLL Player Rankings have nothing to do with reputations, career resumes, success in past seasons, whether we know a player personally, recognizing deserving players who’ve previously been passed over, player popularity, the size of their social media following, whether you slide into their DMs, or who others around the league tell us should get hype.

Our rankings, which only take into consideration a player’s performance for the current regular season, will be calculated using both our star-rating system after each game, but also a player’s season-long statistical position (based on per-game average, not full-season totals) across the league. Only players who have played two-thirds of their team’s games will qualify.

Click here for an even more in-depth description of our scoring system.

Austin Staats, San Diego Seals (Photo: Kalea Vizmanos)

During the San Diego Seals’ dismantling of the Colorado Mammoth this past Sunday, Seals forward Austin Staats netted the NLL’s fourth sock trick this season. The performance also jumped him to 9th in our updated weekly Top 30, which as always, can be found at the bottom of our NLL Player Rankings post.

So firstly and mostly for those new to the NLL, what is a sock trick? It’s box lacrosse’s answer to hockey’s hat trick, but doubled: six goals in one game.

While six-goal games by one player had happened earlier, it was on Saturday, April 3, 2004 in a match between Colorado and the Anaheim Storm, that Mammoth GOAT Gary Gait scored six times, and had fans responded by hurling socks onto to the Pepsi Center turf. Why?

Gary Gait, 2005 NLL All-Star Game Team West (Photo: Dirk Fontaine/LAXMAG)

Here’s an excerpt from the old school Outsider’s Guide to the NLL (a superb source that provided the league coverage online when NLL news was hard to come by) game recap by R.A. Philly:

Pepsi Center public address announcer Willie B is promoting the novel concept that six goals in a lacrosse game merits a hailstorm of socks, much like three goals in a hockey game brings down a torrent of hats.

So, when Gait scored his sixth goal of the game, a meaningless last-minute strike that padded the Mammoth's margin of victory to seven, hundreds of socks landed on the turf.

Once the arena crew finally cleared the floor, a delay of game penalty was assessed against the Mammoth -- and guess who strolled over to the box to serve it.

"That's not my doing, trust me," Gait said of the flying footwear, after spending the last 45 seconds of the game chilling out in the sin bin.

"That's Kroenke Sports group's doing, they pushed it all along and it was great to see. Any time you can get the fans involved, that's a good thing."

Rewinding to the 2005 season, the furthest back full-season stats are publicly available (Source: NLLStats.com) there have been 145 sock tricks (six or more goals) scored during NLL regular seasons. Staats, who scored his first sock trick this past Sunday, is of course this elite & exclusive club’s most recent entry.

Athan Iannucci, Philadelphia Wings

Of those 145 sock-trick performances, 69 players total have officially recorded a six-or-more-goal game. Again, this is only going back to 2005, because, well that’s the furthest available record books allow us to go. Surely Gary Gait, Paul Gait, John Tavares, Tom Marecheck and others have hit six in a single GP (probably more than once) during their legendary careers, but at least for now, there is no way of correctly confirming that. The NLL is over three decades old. If those individual game stats were owned by the league, they’d surely have been shared by now, right? Sadly, it is what it is.

Anyways, below are the since-2005 players that have produced the most sock tricks:

8x

John Grant, Dane Dobbie, and Curtis Dickson

7x

Lewis Ratcliff

5x

Mark Steenhuis, Adam Jones, and Rhys Duch

4x

John Tavares, Athan Iannucci, and Jeff Teat

3x

Callum Crawford, Dan Dawson, Josh Byrne, Keegan Bal, Kevin Crowley, Mark Matthews, Rob Hellyer, Ryan Benesch, Shawn Evans, Stephen Keogh, and Wes Berg

Jack Hannah, Las Vegas Desert Dogs (Photo: Jenn Pierce)

Last year, the Las Vegas Desert Dogs’s Jack Hannah scored a rare rookie sock trick, something that’s only officially ever been done by six other first-year players: Athan Iannucci (2007 Philadelphia), Alex Gajic (2010 Colorado), Mark Matthews (2013 Edmonton), Wes Berg (2016 Calgary), Chris Boushy (2019 Rochester) and Jeff Teat (2022 New York). This year, Albany FireWolves rookie forward Alex Simmons came close when he finished with five against the Buffalo Bandits. It was just his second game in the NLL.

While we’ve seen more sock tricks in more-recent seasons, that mostly comes courtesy of expansion, which means more teams and more games. While our Y axis is showing both a total number and a percentage (Hey, we’re limited by our chart building widget), the below bar chart shows how many total sock tricks were scored in a single season since 2005, plus the percentage of games each regular season saw a sock trick happen.

Sock Tricks: 2005-Today

The 2016 season had a way above average amount of sock tricks scored. In just 81 games, 16 six-or-more-goal games occurred, resulting in almost 20% of games seeing a sock trick take place. This year’s four tricks means only 7% of games have had one, a slow pace which would result in just five more matches with socks on the turf.

This year, Ryan Benesch, Shayne Jackson, Callum Crawford, and of course Staats have seen staff scoop up socks after their stunning goal-scoring performances. Could they do it again? It’s unlikely, but maybe…

Ryan Benesch, Halifax Thunderbirds (Photo: Trevor MacMillan)

Of those 69 players that have produced a sock trick, twelve have done it multiple times in the same season, while a handful of others have achieved multiple multi-sock-trick seasons too. Only Athan Iannucci, Lewis Ratcliff, Adam Jones, and Jeff Teat have scored as many as three sock tricks in one year, while no one in recorded (and available) NLL history has registered as many multiple multi-sock-trick seasons as Curtis Dickson (3).

3 Sock Tricks in the Same Season

Athan Iannucci (2008 Philadelphia), Lewis Ratcliff (2010 Washington), Adam Jones (2016 Colorado), and Jeff Teat (2023 New York)

2 Sock Tricks in the Same Season

Curtis Dickson (2014, 2016 and 2022 Calgary), John Grant (2006 and 2007 Rochester), Lewis Ratcliff (2007 Calgary), John Tavares (2009 Buffalo), Mark Steenhuis (2009 Buffalo), Rhys Duch (2016 Vancouver), Dane Dobbie (2020 Calgary), Keegan Bal (2022 Vancouver), and Josh Byrne (2023 Buffalo)

Curtis Dickson, San Diego Seals (Photo: Michael Hetzel)

The result that started this week’s player rankings post, San Diego’s one-sided Sunday score against Colorado (16-7W), had a number of individual player performances that pushed them up in this week’s updated Top 30: Staats jumped from 12th to 9th, goalie Chris Origlieri, who is behind only our leader Nick Rose in all major goalie data, went from 18th to 14th, and the previously mentioned sock-trick specialist Dickson, has made his first appearance on the leaderboard this year after a game-leading 10 points in that Mammoth murder.

NLL Top 30: Week 11

TW. (LW) Player, Team (Position)

1. (2) Nick Rose, Toronto (G)
2. (1) Josh Byrne, Buffalo (F)
3. (4) Connor Fields, Rochester (F)
4. (6) Jeff Teat, New York (F)
5. (5) Wes Berg, San Diego (F)
6. (8) Ryan Smith, Rochester (F)
7. (7) Dhane Smith, Buffalo (F)
8. (3) Jesse King, Calgary (F)
9. (12) Austin Staats, San Diego (F)
10. (9) Callum Crawford, Panther City (F)
11. (10) Jake Withers, Halifax (D)
12. (11) Mitch Jones, Philadelphia (F)
13. (16) Zach Manns, Saskatchewan (F)
14. (18) Chris Origlieri, San Diego (G)
15. (13) Alex Simmons, Albany (F)
16. (14) Mitch de Snoo, Toronto (D)
17. (17) Randy Staats, Halifax (F)
18. (15) Matt Gilray, Rochester (T)
19. (21) Ethan Walker, Albany (F)
20. (23) Lyle Thompson, Georgia (F)
21. (19) Christian Del Bianco, Calgary (G)
22. (22) Steve Priolo, Buffalo (D)
23. (24) Brad Kri, Toronto (D)
24. (25) Doug Jamieson, Albany (G)
25. (NR) Robert Church, Saskatchewan (F)
26. (20) Shayne Jackson, Georgia (F)
27. (30) Will Malcom, Panther City (F)
28. (NR) Zach Higgins, Philadelphia (G)
29. (NR) Curtis Dickson, San Diego (F)
30. (NR) Dan Craig, Toronto (F)