League Expands Playoff Format

Champion’s Cup Finals will increase to three-game series starting in 2015

The National Lacrosse League has announced the NLL Champion’s Cup Finals will expand to a full best-of-three game series effective for the upcoming 2015 season. The change was unanimously approved today by the NLL Board of Governors.

“Based on the success of the 2014 playoffs, this was the obvious next step for us,” said NLL Commissioner George Daniel. “The 2015 playoffs promise to be our best ever.”

The first two rounds of the playoffs shall remain under the same format as last year with single elimination for both first-round Division Semifinal games and a two-game series for the Division Finals. As adopted for 2014, a 10-minute tiebreaker game will be played immediately following Game 2 of the Division Finals should the series be tied 1-1.

During the 2014 NLL Champion’s Cup Finals, the two-game attendance average was 12,865 while overall attendance for the entire 2014 NLL postseason averaged 10,821 fans, which marked a 62% increase from 2013.

With the expansion to a best-of-three series for the Champion’s Cup Finals, the league is further following the expansion of the playoff format introduced in 2014 where the format was expanded from single elimination to the two-game series format for the Division Finals and Champion’s Cup Finals.

The 2015 NLL Champion’s Cup Finals best-of-three series will be played on three consecutive weekends with the higher-seeded team hosting Game 1 and Game 3 (if necessary). The Champion’s Cup Finals are scheduled to commence with Game 1 on the weekend of May 30, 2015.