Season and Playoffs
Each team in the NLL plays sixteen games during the regular season, eight at home and eight away. The teams are divided into two divisions, the Eastern division and the Western division. Each team plays at least twelve of its sixteen regular season games against division opponents.
The regular season begins in late December and ends in April. At the end the regular season, the top three teams in the Eastern Division and the top four teams in the Western division make the playoffs. Either the fourth-placed Eastern division team or the fifth-placed Western division team, based upon regular season record, also makes the playoffs. The playoffs consist of three single-game elimination rounds. In the first round (the Division Semi-finals), each division winner hosts a fourth-seeded team, and the second-place team hosts the third-place team. In the second round (the Division Finals), the two remaining teams in each division play; the higher-seeded team hosts the game. Two weeks after the Division Finals, the division winners face off for the Champion's Cup.
All NLL games are played on weekends, save for the occasional Friday night game. Most NLL players have full-time jobs off the floor; notable examples include Toronto's Dan Ladouceur, a Durham Region police officer, and Buffalo's John Tavares, a high school teacher in Mississauga, Ontario.
Read more about this topic: National Lacrosse League
Famous quotes containing the words season and and/or season:
“To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.... A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honourable to which a man can be called?”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.”
—William Harmon (b. 1938)