Defensive Player of the Year. Rookie of the Year. MVP.
All of these award winners played for Major League Lacrosse’s Chesapeake Bayhawks in 2017.
With studs like those, they must have been a championship-caliber team, right? Wrong. They went 7-7 and missed the playoffs.
A super-team with too many stars? Not quite.
Jason Noble and Lyle Thompson were Defensive Player of the Year and MVP, respectively, during their championship run with the National Lacrosse League’s Georgia Swarm — a run that culminated in mid-June, exactly midway through the Bayhawks’ season.
Josh Byrne did earn his Rookie of the Year honors in the MLL but didn’t join Chesapeake until June 10, 2017. He was still wrapping up his college career at Hofstra. His NLL team, the Buffalo Bandits, hold the No. 1 spot in the East as of this writing, meaning he could miss a substantial portion of this MLL season too.
Despite possessing a roster full of stars, much of the Bayhawks’ talent isn’t available to them until well into the season.
Welcome to the Proverlap.
Twenty-two players are currently listed on both NLL and MLL rosters — only 10 percent of each league. But those doing double duty aren’t just role players. They are stars, like Brodie Merrill, Tom Schreiber, Curtis Dickson and Jordan MacIntosh.
For the top lacrosse players in the world, playing the sport they love at the highest level creates a frustrating dilemma: Specialize in one league or participate in both with the guarantee of missed games. It’s a no-win situation.