In the National Lacrosse League the league is filled mostly with veteran goalies. Tyler Richards, Brandon Miller, Matt Vinc and Anthony Cosmo to name a few. Nick Rose is a young goalie in Toronto but has been in the league for four seasons now. Evan Kirk, Tyler Carlson and Tye Belanger have started a new trend of young goalies starting in this league.This season and next are full of potential NLL goalies in the draft. This season the top two are Dillon Ward and Blake Duncan. Ward is the starting goalie with the Hamilton Nationals of Major League Lacrosse. He has won junior championships in Orangeville as well. He is a projected first round draft pick.
This is the problem with NLL goalies; there are more good goalies than there are teams. Rochester won’t move on from Vinc, now Vancouver from Richards, Calgary from Mike Poulin or Edmonton from Aaron Bold.
In Philadelphia, Miller is an unrestricted free agent. They had trouble finding a back up last season, from Nick Patterson to Kevin Croswell to Steve Fryer and Angus Dinley.
Those four men are all NLL goalies. In Buffalo, Anthony Cosmo is also a free agent. Backups we will see getting chances are Brodie MacDonald, Zak Boychuk, Angus Goodleaf, Chris Levis, Dan Lewis, Chris Seidel, Scott Komer, Matt Roik, Jake Henhawk, Tyler Glebe, Zach Higgins and Frankie Scigliano, not to mention a few others who did not play in the NLL in 2013.
So where is the room for Ward and Duncan? Colorado has struggled with goaltenders for the past three seasons, but with Belanger as their starter long term, do they use their first rounder on Ward? Does Buffalo take a shot at developing a new tender?
Then we move on to the 2015 draft. Don Alton, Peter Dubinski and Warren Hill are the tops for that season. At this point veterans like Miller, Cosmo, Levis and Roik are older goalies, so do they begin being replaced by the younger goaltenders?
Some of the listed goalies like Henhawk and Goodleaf have been career backups. Would they get starting shots before a young draftee? If you want to go even further, in three years we will see Aleix Buque, Ross Bowman and Brennan Donville. Are these NLL names of the future, and when do we reach a climax of more goalies than this league can support?
