Game
The version of lacrosse played in the NLL is indoor lacrosse otherwise known as box lacrosse. The NLL plays four quarters of fifteen minutes each, with two-minute breaks between the first and second quarters and between the third and fourth quarters, and a twelve-minute break between the second and third (called half-time). The clock does not run when play is stopped. (Canadian Lacrosse Association box lacrosse is played on a hard floor, usually in the summer, and has 4 periods instead of 3.)
The team that has scored the most goals at the end of regulation time is declared the winner. If the game is tied after four quarters have been played, the teams begin sudden death overtime; the team that scores first wins the game. Overtime periods are fifteen minutes long, with two-minute breaks between overtime periods. Prior to the 2005 NLL season, overtime periods were 5 minutes each.
Each team dresses twenty players, of whom two are goaltenders; the remaining eighteen are called runners, and may be either forwards or defensemen. There are also players, frequently defensemen, who specialize in the transition from defense to offense.
The team in possession of the ball has eight seconds to move the ball over the center line, and thirty seconds to take a shot on net. If either of these time periods expires, the whistle is blown, and the opposing team is given possession. In the NLL, the shot clock runs while a team that is killing a penalty has possession of the ball; this is not the case in all box lacrosse leagues (e.g. Major Series Lacrosse, Western Lacrosse Association).
Read more about this topic: National Lacrosse League
Famous quotes containing the word game:
“The indispensable ingredient of any game worth its salt is that the children themselves play it and, if not its sole authors, share in its creation. Watching TV’s ersatz battles is not the same thing at all. Children act out their emotions, they don’t talk them out and they don’t watch them out. Their imagination and their muscles need each other.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“Life is a game in which the rules are constantly changing; nothing spoils a game more than those who take it seriously. Adultery? Phooey! You should never subjugate yourself to another nor seek the subjugation of someone else to yourself. If you follow that Crispian principle you will be able to say “Phooey,” too, instead of reaching for your gun when you fancy yourself betrayed.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)