By Ted Montour, Canada/NLL Editor
There really wasn't time in the NLL 2004 schedule for an All Star break, in fact, the 2004 All star game at the Pepsi Center was the fifth game of week Nine, and  the fortieth contest of this season. Neither was it the pivotal point of the schedule - that has come a couple of weeks after, and the impact, particularly in the East, is significant.
I want to start, however, with the West Division, given the importance of Western expansion to the League's future. The Colorado Mammoth punctuated the success of their first eight weeks with a first-rate job of hosting and staging the All Star game, and the players provided outstanding entertainment. Live coverage on cable TV throughout the US and Canada is a massive first for the League, and Commissioner Jim Jennings was justifiably ebullient.
As to the game itself, the All Star defenders defended, as well as the attackers scored, and the result was a game much more play-off than All Star in nature, and a joy to watch. There was plenty of scoring, to be sure, as Buffalo's Mark Steenhuis, replete in his Bandit orange Dada CDubbs and a hair-do evocative of the NHL Ottawa Senators' Captain Daniel Alfredson, outdueled East teammate Colin Doyle and the West's Gavin Prout for the goal-scoring and MVP awards, potting 6 in the 19 - 15 victory for the East.
No less a personage than NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry, a friend and former colleague of Jennings in the United States Basketball League, wrote in his column for the San Francisco Examiner of how much he was impressed with the intensity and professionalism on display in Denver. Barry, no slouch in the verbiage department in his playing days and since, compared the show and his NLL experience favourably with the crass bling-bling of the NBA All Star week-end two weeks earlier in LA, encouraging Californians to take in a San Jose or Anaheim game, and "Be sure to tell them that Rick Barry sent you."
While the youngsters provided the offensive entertainment, and the game-long feud between the Rock's Glenn Clark and the Mammoth's Jay Jalbert provided some defensive sparks, it was the ageless Dallas Eliuk who shone between the pipes. To the uninitiated, and, let's face it, there are still some in Denver, and more than a few among the TV audience, it might seem absurd to applaud a goalie's performance in a game with 34 goals, but Eliuk was dazzling in the second half, even in defeat. In fact, he had more than a little to do with Steenhuis's MVP, since he owned just about every other Eastern shooter. He scattered 9 goals among his 28 saves, and did it in every conceivable way, cutting angles and challenging outside shooters, reflexing close in, and just plain outguessing some of the best in the NLL. It was a vintage, and a virtuoso, performance, and had the West prevailed, would likely have garnered Eliuk the MVP.
In what was billed as the first ever collegiate indoor lacrosse game (I guess the Carrier Dome in Syracuse doesn't count) the Colorado State University Rams defeated the University of Colorado-Boulder Buffaloes, 15-4. Several NLL clubs, including Calgary and Toronto, have already made initial pitches for next year's ASG, so it looks like one of Commissioner Jennings' original objectives at the time he took over, has been achieved - the NLL All Star game is here to stay as an annual event (and a full-on All Star week-end and schedule break, with the prospect of more expansion and a longer schedule, seems assured).
As to the aforementioned season turning point, it has much more to do with events in the East Division. Incidentally, any worries that fans might become just a tad bored with seeing the same three teams coming to their arenas in Buffalo,Toronto, Rochester or Philadelphia, have been decisively dispelled in the first half of the schedule.
The big story in the East had been the major stumble out of the gate by the champion Toronto Rock, since it was announced that Head Coach and  GM Les Bartley would be leaving the team for the season to make a recovery from colon cancer surgery and post-op treatment. Long-time assistants Ed Comeau and Derek Keenan (known to the players as "Ed and Jammer", and maybe that tells us something) were appointed interim Head Coach and General Manager, respectively, and the transition seemed all but seamless, until the season started.
Over the first eight weeks of NLL 2004, the Rock were 0-4 in the East, their only two wins against Calgary and Vancouver, and on February 17th, in what some might call Plan B from the start, Rock principal owner Brad Watters announced that Terry Sanderson would replace Comeau and Keenan, effectively immediately.
The former head coach and GM in Albany, Montreal and Ottawa, Sanderson, who has won two Mann Cups in six appearances in seven seasons ramrodding the Ontario Senior major Brampton Excelsiors, had been behind the Bandits bench as an assistant to Darris Kilgour, and by all accounts enjoying himself. Watters dodged a tampering charge by sending next year's first round entry draft pick and a cheque to Kurt Silcott. Surprise and disappointment were expressed everyone from Comeau and Keenan, to Rock captain Jim Veltman, to Bartley himself, who had remained in the loop with the team he built, consulted regularly by his replacements and attending games and practices as his treatment regimen permitted.
Watters' decisiveness, if not his tact and diplomacy, were immediately rewarded when Toronto won 15-6 in Vancouver on All Star week-end, but the first real test came two weeks after the change, when the Rock took both ends of a home-and-home series with the Wings, and then, a week after that, decisively defeated Buffalo to move past a stumbling Rochester club into second place in the East.
There is nothing interim about Sanderson's status, or his approach, with his veteran side. Ironically, they now look, again, more like Bartley's Rock, playing smothering defence and capitalizing with a swift and efficient power play (most of their recent PP goals have been scored within the first ten to fifteen seconds of their first possession, accentuating the opposition's mistakes.) Matt Shearer, dressed for just three of six games by Comeau, has started every game for Sanderson, ringing up 10 goals and 7 assists, including 5 markers for a power play he now regularly keys from the top. Goalie Bob "Whipper" Watson, who plays for Sanderson in Brampton, has also found his game again, after going 0-4 to start the winter.
So, while Toronto surveys the Division looking for more Eastern ass to kick, Philadelphia languishes in a fourth-place funk, Rochester continues to falter since losing John Grant Jr. and Marshall Abrams for the season (and picking up Kim Squire and Ed Comeau from the Rock), and Buffalo now looks over their collective shoulder.
In the West the Colorado Mammoth carry all before them, with only two relatively early-season losses to San Jose and Calgary to mar an otherwise-dominant performance. They win big, they win the one-goal games, "Gee" Nash looks like a championship goalie, and Gavin Prout is increasingly being described as the League's heir-apparent to Gary Gait (though I'm sure Grant will have something to say about that again next season).
In all modesty, I claim some prescience for the performance by second-place San Jose, as Johnny Mouradian has made a very successful return to behind-the-bench duties for the Stealth, and made Jim Jennings and the NLL governors look much more like expansion winners in the process. The Vancouver Ravens have disappointed, themselves non plus, as we say in French, and the Calgary Roughnecks continue to look like the third Western play-off team, almost in spite of themselves. Arizona still has miles to go to become contenders, and the Anaheim Storm franchise looks more and more like they need an exorcist more than yet another new coaching and management staff.
To follow up on an earlier story line, Buick Canada recently, at the Canadian round of winter auto shows, rolled out the Allure, which bears a striking resemblance to the LaCrosse. In the my-own-backyard category, the Ontario Lacrosse Association, and new team ownership and management, recently announced that the Ottawa Titans will join the OLA Junior A league, beginning play in the summer of 2005. The new franchise will be the only eastern Ontario entry in the soon-to-be 12-team loop, which consistently sends its top players to the NLL, including an increasing number who add US collegiate experience to their resumés. A club from my adopted hometown will return to contend for the Minto Cup, which, as an open senior field lacrosse trophy, was awarded to the Ottawa Capitals in 1901 and 1906. The Ottawa Emmets (visit www.ottawalacrosse.com, site of the Ottawa Lacrosse Club, established in 1852, to find out more about the Emmets) won a Mann Cup in 1928, also a field lacrosse trophy at the time, now emblematic of the national senior Major Box championship.
At the other end of the province, the OLA Major series has added a new club for 2004. The Windsor Warlocks return to summer play, having been three-time winners of the national Senior B President's Cup in the 1970's.
To illustrate my point above, the first player chosen in the recent OLA Senior Major entry draft was former Junior A scoring champ and now-Delaware Blue Hen Luke Wiles (by the Akwesasne Thunder). Previous first-round draft choices familiar to US collegiate fans include Ottawa's own Jeff Zywicki (Umass - Peterborough Lakers) and the Onondaga Nation's Drew Bucktooth (Syracuse - Akwesasne). In British Columbia, the Western Lacrosse Association (WLA) entry draft last January featured first-overall pick Mark Miyashita (Canisius - Maple Ridge Burrards).
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