If you look at the history of any major professional sports league, its past will be littered with franchises that have folded or moved. This is usually done for financial reasons as owners generally want to run a team that is (very) profitable. Sometimes where they are and the facility is the problem and sometimes the grass is simply greener on the other side. Lacrosse is absolutely no exception to this. The NLL and MLL are littered with team names that are no more. Unfortunately, the lacrosse community added another one to the list this past offseason. The most storied and longest standing organization in professional lacrosse ceased operations as the Philadelphia Wings and became the New England Blackwolves.
As a fan of the league, I was very disappointed to see the Wings go away. I’m glad to say I was able to see their last game in person on a very random trip to Philadelphia last year. Even though they were to miss the playoffs, their history was evident as fans were still walking around in Gait and Marecheck jerseys in addition to all the newer Merrill and Thul versions. A large number of fans stuck around afterwards as well for their last chance to get autographs from the team, even though none of them knew on that day they wouldn’t be returning for another season.
As a New England resident, I was thrilled to find out they were moving to my backyard which helped balance the disappointment of the Wings being no more. The fact they were moving was a bonus. Since professional lacrosse is really a part-time, partial-year job, team continuity is incredibly important. Forcing the league to go through a dispersal draft and then maybe another expansion draft in the future seemed like a terrible idea. Allowing a teams to stay together is the key to success in a league where organized practice is at a premium. This all lead to the idea that the Blackwolves would be immediately relevant in the league, that there would be no expansion team growing pains. As the offseason wore on, trades started happening. Jordan Hall went back to the Knighthawks and Brodie Merrill to the Rock. Garrett Thul is headed to his military commitments and the Blackwolves stockpiled draft picks. This was turning into a drastic change from the Wings. This new team was really becoming a new team. What did this mean for their success in 2015?
Being a very analytical person, I challenged some core assumptions of mine. How important is year to year roster integrity? How do expansion teams fare versus established franchises? Is it better for a team to be relocated or start fresh as a brand new entity? How do other teams fare in these volatile years? All these questions led to the conclusion that I needed cold, hard data to answer them. I set off to grab every team’s roster for every year going back to the 1992 season and compared the number of players returning to that team the subsequent year. This led to some very dark, scary places in league history as one might expect (Charlotte Cobras, anyone?) and the answers to my questions turned out drastically different than I thought they would.
Championships teams rely on returning talent. Rebuilding teams suffer.
This was at the core of what I was looking at. Overall, teams on average return 59% of their game roster each year. That seems low, but with the volatility of the league, it made sense. What about the teams who finish as champions? As it turns out, they only average 66%. While roster sizes have shifted greatly in that time, that 7% equates to only about a player or two difference. The highest number ever seen was from the 1998 Wings team who returned 91% of their players to win it all. On the other side of this, you have the 1996 bandits with only 45% of their team returning while the 2012 Knighthawks (and their 7-9 regular season record turned first of three championships team) sat at 47%. That 45% to 91% is a big swing, .
What about the runner-up teams? They sat at a very similar spot, returning an average of 64% of their roster. The low point there is the 2012 Edmonton Rush with 38% while the 2001 Rock featured a hefty 85%. That 85% second place team is also what was sandwiched directly in the middle of four championship teams for the Rock. Oddly enough, the next year, they only kept 53% and still finished on top.
The rebuilding teams can be hurt, but only if you’re talking drastic changes. The extremes here are the ’02 Columbus Landsharx (14%) and three others who all returned 24%. None of these teams made the playoffs. There are several teams though who sit at 33% and did make the playoffs. The big key is if you do a big rebuild, who are you rebuilding with? That 45% Bandits championship team from earlier? Some of the returning players with their most significant playing time were John Tavares, Jim Veltman, Tory Cordingley, and Darris Kilgour while adding Mike Hasen. The same can be said for the 2012 Knighthawks who returned Cody Jamieson, Matt Vinc, Pat McCready and Jordan Hall while adding Stephen Keogh and Johnny Powless among others.
Simply put, if the team has some key players to build around and you add good, young talent or solid free agents, there’s no reason why a roster shakeup will hurt immediate postseason chances.
How do brand news teams fare versus relocated teams?
This was one of the more interesting items to look into. Five teams made it into the playoffs in their inaugural season with a 100% brand new roster (Bandits, Knighthawks, Portland Lumberjax, Vancouver Ravens and ’09 Boston Blazers) with the Bandits winning it all and the Knighthawks finishing second. The second edition Blazers were especially interesting as they made the playoffs each year they were around, while the Lumberjax only missed one year and made the one championship game. This also means that 12 did not do so well in their first year, but four of those made it into the postseason in their second year while two others never even had a second season.
Relocated franchises fared better. There are 12 instances where a team moved. Of those 12, six made it into the postseason right away including two champions. Both the Toronto Rock and Washington Stealth won it all in their new homes. Of all these relocated teams, there’s no major correlation between roster turnover and immediate success.
So for whatever reason, it does seem that a relocated team fares better than a brand new expansion. It may be due to continuity of moved teams with regards to ownership, coaches and/or front office to make coordination and game day activities smoother, but that’s just a theory.
How much does league expansion and contraction affect individual teams?
This more than anything surprised me the most. Common sense says that if you’re holding expansion or dispersal drafts due to new or folding teams, the rest of the league will experience more significant roster shakeup. Oddly enough, there was no correlation between these two factors barring extreme circumstances. Between the 2001 and 2002 seasons, four teams were added (Roughnecks, NJ Storm, Vancouver Ravens and Montreal Express). This led to a league-wide drop in roster stability all the way to 48%.
What’s more interesting is that stability numbers actually increased in the expansion and contraction years eight different times. This is compared to these numbers dropping ten times during unstable years. I would have expected to see a bigger correlation, but year on year, the numbers stay very close to the overall average of 59% regardless of these extra activities.
This does not mean there isn’t a larger league impact to team instability. By moving and losing teams, you lose fans, sponsors are more skeptical and news fans are more hesitant to become heavily invested either emotionally or financially. It does mean though that each team can operate relatively normal regardless of the league-wide activities in this case.
What does this all mean for the Blackwolves?
Getting back to my original quest of evaluating these different factors in relation to the Blackwolves. Looking at the Wings’ recent history, since 2003, they only made the postseason three times. What’s encouraging there is that they appeared two times in a row before last year’s major unplanned roster overhaul due to several American players not reporting. With the core group of returning players being combined with that was a very large draft and free agent pool, their roster turnover from 2014 is likely high. Until we see the final roster in a few weeks, we won’t know for sure how they’ll look officially, but based on the data I’ve looked at, there is no reason that Blackwolves should be counted out this year. The talent level in the NLL is just too high for any team to be in the back seat for long.
A final observation is also something that should be reassuring to NLL fans. Despite this very checkered past, with all these teams that many never heard of, let alone watched, the current state of the league is the best it has ever been. Since George Daniel has been Commissioner since 2009, three teams have folded, while no new franchises have started and failed. There have been moves with the Stealth and now Wings, but the total team count of nine is going into its fourth season. Prior to this and going back until 1992, the league has never had the same number of teams for more than two years in a row. While many teams have been open about the struggles they have financially, it’s important to note that this is the most stable period the league has ever had. That also means that there has been no better time to be a fan or to introduce new ones to the indoor game.
