Renaming the NLL Awards

Take a look at the list of NHL awards. You have the Conn Smythe, the Vezina, the Calder, the Art Ross, the Hart, the Norris, and so on. What do they have in common? They're all named after people. Some were not hockey players (Lady Byng or Lord Stanley himself), but most were either players or coaches. Similarly, MLB (Cy Young), the NBA (Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy), and the NFL (Vince Lombardi Trophy) also have awards named for former players and coaches.

The NLL has begun to embrace this trend as well. They have the Les Bartley Award for coach of the year, honouring the late Les Bartley who won seven Championships as coach of the Bandits and coach/GM of the Rock. There's also the Tom Borrelli Award, named for the Buffalo News writer who covered the Bandits for 16 years. That's all there is, but there's a good reason for that. The NLL / MILL / Eagle Pro league has only been around for 25 years, nothing like the 90+ years of the NHL, so many of the people who you might eventually want to name awards after are still in the game, or haven't been out for long. But just for fun, let's explore the possibility of renaming the NLL awards.

Champion's Cup

The first award that comes to mind is the Champion's Cup itself. It's got a boring name, so it's a good candidate for renaming. But who deserves such an honour? It would have to be someone exceptionally important in the history of the league, preferably someone who was involved in winning it at least once. The first name that comes to mind for me is Les Bartley, but he's already got an award – in fact, he's got two. The Toronto Rock also have a Les Bartley Award, which is given to "the Rock player that best exemplifies Les' emphasis on the importance of character and commitment to the team". So if not Bartley, who else? They weren't players, but you could argue that few people are as important to the history of the NLL as the founders of the league, Russ Cline and Chris Fritz. The Cline-Fritz Trophy sounds pretty good.

Most Valuable Player

This one seems pretty obvious to me. Only two people have ever been named league MVP more than once – John Tavares three times, and Gary Gait an incredible six times, including five in a row. No question, the MVP award should be renamed the Gary Gait Award. But Tavares has been one of the top players in the league for what seems like forever – he deserves something. It seems weird to consider naming an award after John Tavares considering he's still an active player, but once he does retire, perhaps the John Tavares Award could be given to the player who leads the league in scoring each year.

Goaltender of the Year

The Goaltender of the Year Award has two obvious candidates. In any poll you'll ever see about the best NLL goalies ever, Bob Watson and Dallas Eliuk will pretty much always finish at numbers 1 and 2, though people will argue about the ordering. Bob Watson won the award twice while Eliuk never did but to be fair, the award didn't exist until 2001 – the year Eliuk won the last of his four Championships with the Wings. He would have been a lock for at least a couple in the late 90's. But given that Watson won it twice, and won Championship Game MVP twice (oh wait, so did Eliuk), and won six Championships to Eliuk's four, and that as a Rock fan I'm totally biased, I'm going to recommend the Bob Watson Award.

Defensive Player of the Year

Now it gets a little tougher. One of the best pure defenders I've ever seen was Pat Coyle, who for some crazy reason isn't in the NLL Hall of Fame. Coyle played for seven seasons with the Rock organization and four with Colorado, winning five Championships. Now, there was that incident way back in 1994 where he punched a ref during a game and was banned for life from the MILL. Once the MILL morphed into the NLL, it was decided that the ban no longer applied, so he came back. Seeing as the league did give him the first-ever Defensive Player of the Year Award in 2002 it seems that they got over that ugly incident, so perhaps they'd consider naming an award after him. Though if they decide against renaming the Sportsmanship Award after him, I'd understand.

Transition Player of the Year

It would make sense to rename the Transition Player of the Year Award for a player who excelled at that position, but players haven't been called "transition" for all that long, and the award has only existed since 2007.  Jim Veltman was always listed as a defender, but was comfortable at both ends of the floor, and these days would likely be considered a transition player. I can think of nobody better for this award than Veltman, but I'm going to save him for later. Perhaps someday this will be the Brodie Merrill or Mark Steenhuis Award, but until we've had transition players for longer than 5 years, I'd say we leave this one alone for now.

Rookie of the Year

This is a weird one. For the other awards, you want to pick someone who was outstanding at that position for many years, but you can only be a good rookie once. So we'll pick someone who won it and went on to have an outstanding career. Well, that's getting to be a pretty long list: Gary Gait, Tom Marechek, Colin Doyle, John Grant, Tracey Kelusky, and Blaine Manning have all won this award. Gait already has the MVP Award, so I'm going to suggest Tom Marechek, who played twelve outstanding seasons with the Philadelphia Wings. We even have a nickname for the Tom Marechek Rookie of the Year Award already – the Hollywood Cup.

Executive of the Year

Let's go back in history once again, and pick a builder that was instrumental in the early years of the league. Mike French led the Eagle Pro Box Lacrosse League in scoring in its inaugural season, and then became the GM of the Philadelphia Wings the next year. Over the next seven years, the Wings won three Championships, including one when French was also the head coach. He's been part of the Wings ownership group since 1998, and was inducted into the NLL Hall of Fame in 2007. He is also the only member of both the Canadian and US Lacrosse Halls of Fame.

Sportsmanship Award

I mentioned that I was saving Jim Veltman for later, and it's now later. Veltman was the first winner of this award in 2002, and to me, nobody in the NLL exemplifies leadership and character more than Scoop.

GM of the Year

Is there a GM who's stood out over the history of the league as consistently being a part of winning teams? I originally thought of Terry Sanderson, despite the fact that he's never won this award, because of the outstanding Rock teams he put together – first after effectively taking over for Les Bartley, and then again cleaning up the mess made by Mike Kloepfer. But outside of the Rock, the only GM job Sanderson has had was for one year as GM of the Montreal Express. He's also worked for Ottawa, Albany, Philadelphia, and Calgary but only in coaching positions. I'm not sure his GM resume, as good as it is, warrants renaming the award after him. The other one that comes to mind is Johnny Mouradian, who built the Bandits into a team that won an incredible 22 consecutive games and three titles, and then won two more titles with the Rock in two years. He didn't win any titles with San Jose, but did win GM of the Year in 2004, and was inducted into the NLL Hall of Fame in 2008. So we'll go with him.

So here's the list of NLL awards and my proposed name changes:

OK, it's highly possible that my Rock fan bias is showing here – almost half of the proposals are for people who were associated with the Rock. I expect that there will be many people who disagree with some of my choices – please feel free to leave a comment if you are one of them.

Don't do it

Make no mistake, this will not happen any time soon. In fact, I don't think it should happen any time soon. This whole thing has been an interesting exercise, but the league simply hasn't been around long enough for these name changes to really be warranted. Once another ten years have gone by, then maybe you start thinking about these kind of things. But not yet.

except...

There is one exception. I propose that the MVP Award be renamed the Gary Gait Award (or the Gary Gait MVP Award), effective immediately. I'm sure there are fans who follow the league who think of Gait as some guy who used to be good, but know him more for his comeback attempt with Rochester or even as a coach with the Mammoth. Gary Gait "used to be good" the way Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and Michael Jordan "used to be good", with one slight difference. When Gretzky, Orr, and Jordan were at their peak, they were far and away the best players in the league, head and shoulders above second place. That's not completely true for Gary, but only because his brother Paul was pretty freakin' good as well.

Gait won five consecutive NLL MVP Awards. Of all the athletes in all the North American team sports, only Gait and Wayne Gretzky have accomplished this. If you ask a sports fan who does not follow lacrosse to name a lacrosse player, in all honesty, they probably can't. But if they're remotely familiar with lacrosse and can come up with only one name, that name is likely to be Gary Gait (or possibly Con Bro Chill, which is a travesty in itself). As arguably the greatest lacrosse player of all time, Gait has more than earned the right to be associated with every league MVP going forward.

The reason I think this should be done immediately is so that people don't forget the impact that Gait had. There was an article in the Toronto Star recently about Wayne Gretzky, and how as more of his contemporaries retire, people are beginning to forget just how good he was. The stats are obviously available and are still outstanding and he still holds records there that may never be broken. But as time goes on, there will be more and more hockey fans who never saw him play. Gary Gait did play in two games last year, but his last really great season was 2005, and there are a lot of current NLL fans that weren't NLL fans back in '05. Just like with Gretzky, that number will continue to dwindle going forward. I think the league should honour Gait now before people start to think that he was just another pretty good lacrosse player who scored a lot of goals.