The now #1 Notre Dame Fighting Irish men’s lacrosse dominated the then-#1 Duke Blue Devils, 17-12, on a beautiful Saturday at Arlotta Stadium. The Irish are at the top of all polls going into their bye week.
The Plot
After weeks of playing in miserable weather, the boys and their fans were greeted by 60 degree temps and a sunny sky.
The teams exchanged scoreless possessions with the expected matchups of Fake/O’Neill and Conlin/McAdorey coming into focus. Duke opened with a goal a few minutes into the game.
On the other end of the field, it was also becoming clear that Duke was going to have challenges dealing with the Irish ride.
Eric Dobson scored for the Irish three minutes into the game (to our estimation, the 7th time this season he has opened the scoring). Duke tried defending him with a short stick midfielder, and to quote ESPN play-by-play announcer Anish Schroff, “Dobson said come along for a ride.”
The teams were in a stalemate for much of the rest of the quarter until broken by a Duke goal, followed quickly by a Jake Taylor goal, and then another Duke goal to put the visitors up 3-2 at the end of the first. It was becoming clear that the Irish were focused on keeping the Duke attack off the scoreboard and to take their chances with the Blue Devil midfield.
Ben Ramsay tied it up on a fast break soon into the second quarter, followed by a Chris Kavanagh goal to take the lead.
A few minutes later the Irish put on a show with an amazing Taylor to Pat Kavanagh goal to beat the shot clock.
🤯😱🤯😱
Double BTBs to beat the shot clock as Taylor goes BTB to Pat Kavanagh who comes up with the insane finish! Watch on ESPNU.#SCTop10 x #GoIrish pic.twitter.com/LLd7eVcIex
— Notre Dame Lacrosse (@NDlacrosse) April 8, 2023
The Irish scored two more before Duke’s Dyson Williams tried to stop the bleeding. But PKav, CKav and Dobson followed with goals quickly to put the Irish up 9-4 at the half and with all the momentum.
A Dobson missile seconds into the third quarter continued the assault that ended the second, but Duke regrouped to score 5 of the next 7 goals to get within 3 of the Irish and cause a little bit of concern.
But then PKav backed down the much larger Kenny Brower and snuck in a goal that deflated the Blue Devils. Three more goals by CKav sandwiched around a nice Reilly Gray goal extended the lead to 17-9 with a half quarter to play. The boys coasted in to a final of 17-12.
The Scoring
The Kavanaghs are the top of the sheet with PKav’s 3g, 5a performance (along with 5 gbs!!), and CKav’s 5 goals. Dobson’s hat trick and an assist, along with Taylor’s 2g, 1a score line were also critical.
Jack Simmons (1g, 2a) and Reilly Gray (1g, 1a) kept the defense from being able to support the interior, and Tevlin and Ramsay had goals exploiting transition opportunities.
Chris Fake was dominant with 3 ground balls and 2 caused turnovers. The LSM trio were fantastic as well with Boyer (2 gb, 1 ct), Donovan (3 gb, 1 ct) and Burgmaster (1 gb).
Entenmann was solid and consistent from beginning to end with 15 saves.
The Irish were a perfect 23 of 23 clearing the ball and had only 9 turnovers. This helped result in Notre Dame having more offensive possessions than Duke even with their 22 of 33 faceoff wins.
Man-up was 1 for 2 opportunities, and man-down allowed two goals in 5 Duke opportunities (It was surprising to see Duke’s Jake Naso’s diving inability to stand).
Ground balls were equal on the scoresheet, but excluding faceoffs yielded the Irish a 23-19 advantage.
Lacrossereference.com calculated 43.6% offensive efficiency to go along with 31.6% defensive efficiency against the vaunted Duke attack!
The bench was very short against Duke, with 22 Irish seeing the field. Duke wasn’t much more expansive with 24 players.
Our Pregame Questions
Let’s review our thoughts going into the game:
- Consistent, balanced offense: This end of the field did as well as we could have hoped. It took a few minutes to get rolling and it was Kavanagh-focused, but this latter part was the product of Dobson, Simmons, Taylor and others requiring the attention of the Duke defense. Brower was on an island because he had to be.
- Defensive control: It’s hard to overstate the level of execution of the defensive plan. Chris Fake is rightfully getting all the player of the week accolades for his fantastic defense of O’Neil, but we can’t overlook Chris Conlin’s control over McAdorey, which in turn, minimized the opportunities for Dyson Williams. Of course, allowing Fake and Conlin to focus on their one-on-one responsibilities wouldn’t have worked without the SSDMs and LSMs doing their jobs with minimal slide help. Notre Dame typically sends help fairly early. The strategy against Duke was a departure from their norm, and it was great to see them be able to execute so effectively.
- Keep momentum at faceoff: The 11 for 33 faceoff stat does not remotely do Lynch and Hagstrom justice. Their wings were a great help, of course, but the faceoff specialists did a lot of the hard work keeping Naso from creating anything from his wins. Certainly, outright faceoff wins are ideal, but making sure every opponent win ends in stalemate isn’t a bad plan B.
Thoughts
PKav limped off the field with about 4 minutes to play and the result secure. We haven’t heard anything definitive about it and hope it’s not anything a bye week can’t resolve.
Speaking of PKav, we are ashamed to admit it took this battle with Kenny Brower to appreciate the nuance of the PKav dodge/redodge/redodge again. There were two flavors on display. The first was when he had Brower on an island. Pat Kavanagh would keep bodying up until he felt the defender switch to defending the left with his stick, and then it was a rollback to his right to shoot from a hidden position. That’s not easy, but it’s so clever. The second flavor was to occupy the eyes of the rest of the defense by battling Brower until CKav could generate a switch to a short stick defender on the backside, and then get it to CKav with this mismatch in place. Both require tremendous physical work to create a subtle, but powerful, advantage.
With Nick Harris out of the lineup due to injury, Coach Corrigan had to shorten the SSDM rotation to Tevlin, McCahon, Ramsay and Parlette. They were supremely effective, but coach was not wrong in his post-game comments that the priority during the bye week is to find another midfielder on the roster ready to play defense at that level.
In addition to the great SSDM play, the LSM effort was its equal. Boyer, Burgmaster and Donovan kept constant pressure on the Duke midfield both from the wings and in settled defense. This did a lot to keep the workload on the short sticks to a manageable level.
Duke’s 19 for 21 clearing state severely understates the effectiveness and impact of the Notre Dame ride led by PKav and CKav. They forced Duke to play so conservatively that the idea of them generating any transition offense was fantasy.
kavanagh brothers are the ultimate teammates — leaders, grinders, fantastic goal scorers, assist record holders, ride like animals, humble & hungry pic.twitter.com/RdHk8gClPQ
— Paul Rabil (@PaulRabil) April 10, 2023
Future
A short schedule involved a lot of risk for this team, but now that the boys have proven themselves against the best, the wisdom of a weekends-only schedule with a perfectly placed bye week has come into focus. Every team is battling injury, but the Irish have done well to keep incidents to a minimum. The team will have the week to rest recover for the final quarter of the regular season.
What comes next is the very difficult stretch of UNC-UVa-UNC, with the last two being on the road. UNC has quietly entered the top-10 on the strength of their supremely efficient defense. They’ve held the top statistical spot on defense all season, and hold it by a big margin. And obviously, the rematch at Virginia looms large. Every facet of the team will be tested in this final push.
Please also take a look at our colleague Drew Brennan’s wrapup.
#GoIrish
This was my first in-person lacrosse game since COVID and it was great. There were a couple dozen cars tailgating, we had decided in advance to walk around campus rather than do something like that so we didn’t set up, but it was cool to see people excited about the matchup.
Walking in was a little funny with the lack of security theater that going to football games involves, which was a welcome difference. Right before game time the ushers started asking people to sit a bit closer together in the middle sections of the stands and showing later arrivers to the decreasing number of empty seats. The berm was packed and by the middle of the first quarter the endzone bleachers on the south side were full too, which I guess is how ND is claiming 5,000 person attendance in a stadium with 2,500 seats in the main stands.
The defense played well across the board, but Fake was noticeably excellent. He was impossible to dodge and was causing their offense to reset throughout the shot clock even when it was winding down perilously.
I asked the NDLacrosse twitter account to weigh in on the Dobson 6:12 in the second quarter shot that the attendees not wearing stripes thought went in and they never responded, fortunately the team was really rolling in the second quarter so it didn’t end up feeling like a controversy.
Regarding the fourth quarter injuries, I’m fairly certain that PKav had a bad calf cramp and Fake got cup-checked. Fake only went off the field as a procedural matter and came back on shortly after. PKav didn’t return to the game, but after getting stretched out on the sideline he did celebrate with the team and do the handshake line following the game walking with only a hint of a limp walking off the field.
The other benefit of making the trip in for a lacrosse game rather than football is it was way easier to get a table at Rocco’s following an afternoon at Arlotta. I’m probably only considering a hypothetical trip to Philly to see another game live this year, so hopefully the team can sharpen up the last month of the season and be ready for the playoffs.
We looked at the Dobson goal like the Zapruder film, and it clearly hit net even if Anish and Carc didn’t give it much attention. The net in those new Gilman goals is attached to the goal with a steel rod mechanism. Ball ricochets out just like if it hit pipe. Youth league parents go ballistic when refs don’t see it, i can only imagine what folk thought at Arlotta..but as you note, the boys were rolling at the time so it quickly ceased being a concern.
Glad to have your assessment that PKAv only cramped. When he hobbled off than got no more camera time, it was hard not to get worried.
Lastly, we hope to join you in Philly 🥍🏆
In case anyone’s curiosity was piqued with the goal frame talk, it’s basically a little inner post inside the goal, but when it hits the inner post the net billows, like it did in this case.
I definitely overheard a couple of conversations about Philly around the stadium. Whether it’s more appropriate to call it hope or expectations, whichever it it they’re really high.
There’s a clear separation between 1-4 (maybe 1-5) and everyone else. Unless committee has any of these play each other in the QFs, it’s hard to think of there being any upsets going into Memorial Day weekend. We’ve gotten hosed before (2022) playing MD in QF, as did UVA last year, so there are no guarantees unfortunately.