Let’s not play games with qualifiers. Dhane Smith is the greatest NLL player of his generation, and if you want to make the case he’s the best to ever lace up a pair of indoor cleats, the argument is there for the taking. The 2024–25 season just made it impossible to look away.
Smith finished the regular season with 102 assists — breaking his own NLL single-season record. His own record. The one he already set. He also tied Josh Byrne for the league scoring lead at 134 points. His team won the NLL Championship. The Buffalo Bandits took home their seventh title and became just the second franchise in league history to complete back-to-back-to-back championships. Smith was at the center of every bit of it.
The Numbers Don’t Need Your Validation
102 assists. Stop. Just sit with that. There are players in this league who don’t record 102 points in a season. Smith made 102 plays where he moved the ball to a teammate who finished. That’s not a stat line — that’s a philosophy. His game is built around making everyone around him better, and he does it at a volume no one else in NLL history has touched. The old record? Also his. The record before that? Probably someone else, but Smith erased it so long ago the name barely registers.
Tied for the scoring lead at 134 points with Byrne means he shared the top of the leaderboard while racking up the most assists in league history in a single season. That’s not a coincidence — that’s what happens when a transcendent playmaker also knows how to put points on the board himself. His 32 goals weren’t an afterthought. They were the thing that makes him truly unguardable: you can’t shade your defense toward the pass because he will bury you himself.
The MVP Snub: Address It Directly
Here’s where the takes get spicy. Smith won Offensive Player of the Year. He did not win MVP. That award went to Connor Fields of Rochester — 46 goals, 76 assists, 122 points, 148 loose ball recoveries on a team that finished 10–8 and got bounced in the first round of the playoffs.
Fields is a monster. That is not up for debate. His season was incredible. But MVP of a league where the best player won the championship, broke the assists record, and tied for the scoring lead… went to a guy whose team lost in the quarterfinals? That’s the kind of voting result that happens when individual brilliance gets weighted over team context, and in a sport as team-dependent as box lacrosse, it’s a strange call.
Smith’s Offensive POY honor tells you the voters saw the performance. The MVP result tells you they found a way to honor Fields’ gaudy counting stats without fully grappling with what Smith did in a team setting. Both can be true: Fields had the better individual statistical case on raw numbers, and Smith had the more valuable season. Those things don’t cancel each other out. They just mean the hardware distribution was imperfect.
The Championship Context Is Everything
Buffalo went 13–5 in the regular season. They swept Vancouver in two games in the semifinals. They beat Saskatchewan 2–1 in the Finals — including dropping Game 2 in overtime before responding with a 15–6 blowout in the deciding game. This was not a team that sneaked through a bracket. This was the best team in the NLL winning in dominant fashion.
And Smith was the engine. Ian MacKay won Finals MVP, and fair enough — he delivered when it mattered most. But the whole machine runs through Smith. It has for years. The Bandits’ dynasty doesn’t exist without him running the offense and breaking defenders’ will over 18 games a season, year after year.
That’s the part that gets lost when you only look at a single season’s numbers. Smith isn’t just a stats merchant. He’s been the most important player on the NLL’s most successful recent franchise across a sustained window of dominance. That’s legacy. That’s what separates a great player from a generational one.
So Where Does He Rank in NLL History?
The honest answer is he belongs in the conversation for greatest of all time. Not just his generation — all time. The NLL has had brilliant players across four decades. Scoring records used to seem untouchable. Smith has been rewriting the assists record against himself for years now, which means the record keeps getting harder to break because the ceiling keeps rising.
Multiple championships. All-time assists leader by a margin that isn’t close. Consistent presence at the top of the scoring leaderboard for the better part of a decade. If you’re building the argument that he’s the best NLL player ever, you have more ammunition than you need. If you want to pump the brakes and say “greatest of his generation” instead of all time, that’s fine — but recognize that’s the conservative take, not the objective one.
Dhane Smith just broke his own assists record, tied for the league scoring lead, and won a championship. The bar for “greatest NLL player of his generation” was already cleared a long time ago. We’re arguing about something bigger now.