A look at the Bayhawks and The Lizards this week.

This week you have a matchup between The Long Island Lizards and The Chesapeake Bayhawks. Both teams are coming off big victories last weekend and this game has huge implications. The Lizards need to continue winning, they are on the outside looking in right now and if they want to keep that play off dream alive they need to win and hope that Boston knocks Hamilton down a peg. Chesapeake has the opportunity to punch their own ticket to the playoffs this weekend. They need to beat Long Island by a margin of four or better to give them the goal differential over Long Island for the season. Both teams fought hard last week and it’s not going to be any easier this week.

Long Island, is going to need to pick right up where their left off against Boston last week. They are going to need to play shut down defense, slide packages in the ball handler’s face the very same way they did in the second half last week.  They were able to do it against what is widely renowned as the best offense in The MLL, but can they keep it up? The defending champions don’t lack for weapons on offense so it’s going to be a tall order.

On the offensive side, Long Island needs to score more goals. The have average right around 11 goals a game and haven’t recorded a dominant victory all season. While Coach Jim Mule said on the conference call that those are the type of 1 point games they will need to be successful. More often than not against the playoff teams this year, Boston, Denver and Chesapeake 11 to 12 points is not going to be enough.

The Bayhawks on the other side seem to be hitting their stride down the stretch. Back to back wins the last two weeks, statistically they are the second best team in Major League Lacrosse in a number of categories and they have a coaching staff that has done it before.  Some would even venture to say that this is the way Chesapeake operates. Slow start, find their grove mid-season and make a run down the stretch. It’s how they won it all last year.

In order to keep the streak going The Bayhawks are going to need to frustrate Long Island chippy. When Long Island defense gets frustrated it has shown to be a weakness of The Lizards this year. Chesapeake will need to dominate on the face off X where Long Island has struggled all year and execute in their transition game. The Bayhawks have the shooters, both long range and in close they need to fire early and often and get goalie Drew Adams on his heels. If they play in to Long Island’s style of play as The Cannons did last week they will be in for a long evening.