The Vancouver Canucks brought Curt Malawsky in to run their lacrosse team. This is when he might be his most valuable to them.
Malawksy has key to the turnaround of the Vancouver Warriors. That’s true. They made a three-win jump in his second year with the National Lacrosse League club last season, finishing 11-7. They made playoffs for the first time, too, since the Canucks bought the franchise in 2018 and just the second time in the past 11 seasons.
They were swept in the semifinals by the Buffalo Bandits.
Players in the league liked how things were trending enough that the Warriors became a go-to destination for free agents in the off-season, highlighted by the additions of Curtis Dickson and Jesse King, who were both 100-point scorers with the Calgary Roughnecks.
Lacrosse people think they could win it all this season. The NLL web site power rankings have them at No. 3 in their power rankings to start the year. Other pundits have them as the team to beat.
And Malawsky has seen all this before. He knows this drill. He had Burnaby Laker teams Junior A summer lacrosse who were expected to win national championships and did just that. He had teams during his time with the Roughnecks who were highly touted and lived up to their billing.
Malawsky understands being a frontrunner and that’s going to be integral to this Warrior season. He’s not going to let the hype hurt.
“There’s a feeling out there that Vancouver has potential to be a wagon but, at the end of the day, they are just names on paper,” said Malawsky, whose team opens the NLL regular season tonight hosting the Colorado Mammoth at Rogers Arena. “We need to jell and we need to come together and we still need time together on the floor.
“We need to build the team chemistry and that team cohesion. We need to start trusting and really believing in the guy next to you.
“You need those one-goal games. You need to win them, you need to lose them. You need to be a part of a blowout. All those things add up and guys get really invested in each other and invested in the team.”
For an example of what lacrosse people are thinking about the Warriors, Lax Mag surveyed five players from each of hte league’s 14 teams anonymously, and 98 per cent of respondents picked Vancouver to be one of the four semifinalists this season. That was the highest number of any team, followed by the Buffalo Bandits at 95 per cent and the Saskatchewan Rush at 60 per cent.
Other notable Vancouver mentions in the 29-question survey? Malawsky was tabbed top coach (27 per cent, eight percent more than runner-up John Tavares of Buffalo), King and Dickson were No. 1-2 in biggest impact with a new team (King at 27 per cent, Dickson at 17 and new Las Vegas Desert Dog Chase Fraser third at 10 per cent) and the Warriors were the leaders in regarding the best spot to traded to (Vancouver at 33 per cent, followed by San Diego at 26 per cent).
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