2026 NLL Player Rankings: Defensive Player of the Year

While The Lax Mag’s National Lacrosse League Player Rankings typically orders the league’s Top 30 players from #1 to #30 since soon after the league’s opening weekend and right up to the end of the regular season, now that we’re in playoff mode, we’re shifting focus to our NLL year-end awards.

Specifically, who our rankings system (more on that here) says should win all of the NLL’s most important end-of-season honours, plus a new one for us this year: Rising Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Transition Player of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, Goalie of the Year, and of course, Most Valuable Player.

Following the same rules for our weekly Top 30 (again, see here), only players that played at least two-thirds of the NLL regular season will be considered.

All of The Lax Mag’s awards will be announced throughout the 2026 NLL Playoffs.

Matt Hossack, 2025 Defensive Player of the Year

DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR

Earlier this year, we reviewed what recent NLL Defensive Player of the Years have in common.

Often, not much.

Some seasons leading in multiple defensive categories means a lot, but then a year later, putting up league-leading defensive stats means nothing. In other seasons, registering offensive stats that are more Transition Player of the Year worthy are seemingly all of a sudden really important to voters, but then other seasons aren’t taken into consideration at all.

We’ve also outlined in the past that playing on a winning team often means more to voters than individual accolades, which for individual honours, makes little to no sense. Out of the league’s six most major awards this year (MVP, OPOTY, DPOTY, TPOTY, GOTY and ROTY), just one of the the 18 finalists played on a team that missed the playoffs. Can the league’s top defender (or other positional player) not play on a team that is shit in the standings? Of course he can, but apparently not in the NLL, and that goes for virtually every award in the league, especially in the modern era.

Anyways, below are this year’s Top 5 highest ranked defensemen as confirmed by The Lax Mag’s NLL Player Rankings calculations, which take into account where a player ranks statistically across the league and where we rank them in our star-rating system after every single game this year (again, more on our system here).

TOP 5 DEFENSIVE PLAYERS

Nick Chaykowski, Oshawa FireWolves (Photo: David Pickering)

5. Nick Chaykowski

Age: 29
Team: Oshawa FireWolves
Stat Line: 1 G, 3 A, 125 LB, 27 CTO, 14 BLK
Acquired: 2017 NLL Entry Draft (17th overall)
From: Bradford, ON

Over the first few months of the season, you could have easily argued Nick Chaykowsky as this year’s very best pure defensive player, but…

First Four Games (Avg.)

LB: 7.50
CTO: 2.50
BLK: 1.00

Final Four Games (Avg.)

LB: 7.75
CTO: 1.75
BLK: 0.25

While his LB scooping stayed about the same, he saw a significant drop in turnover and blocking numbers late. Still, Chaykowski posted career highs for caused turnovers (27) and blocked shots (14), plus was just two snags shy of matching his best-ever loosie total too (125). For those that feel Chaykowski’s stat line only went up this year because he was hurt by a stingy Albany stats crew (the FireWolves played their first season in Oshawa after relocating from New York’s capital), he actually collected more LB, CTO and BLK at MVP Arena last year than all his 2025 away games combined. Forget where Oshawa sat in the standings (13th out of 14 teams) or that as a team gave up more shots on goal than all but three clubs this year, if you’re evaluating Nick Chaykowski as an individual defender in 2026, there is no question, his D-specific numbers and value to the struggling FireWolves, easily rank him as one of this year’s top defensive players.

Graeme Hossack, Halifax Thunderbirds (Photo: Trevor MacMillan)

4. Graeme Hossack

Age: 33
Team: Halifax Thunderbirds
Stat Line: 4 G, 10 A, 132 LB, 20 CTO, 19 BLK
Acquired: 2015 NLL Entry Draft (2nd overall)
From: Port Perry, ON

We pulled the Top 20 per-game averages for the league’s three main defensive stats: loose balls, caused turnovers and blocks. Only four players in the league registered in all three of those 20 pulls. One was Jake Boudreau, who for the second straight year cracked our season-ending TPOTY Top 5. The others were Nick Chaykowski (#5 above), Mitch de Snoo (keep scrolling to find him) and is often is the case from season to season, Graeme Hossack. The Halifax Thunderbirds defender registered his ninth straight 100+ LB season, and while his CTO collection was still far from the 49 he finished with in 2023 (the 4th highest total ever recorded in a single season, also our DPOTY that year, but not the league’s choice), he did have at least 20 caused turnovers for the eighth time in Hossack’s nine full seasons in the league (his tenth was the COVID-canned campaign). Plus, during Halifax’s late-season push for the playoffs, Hossack saw a significant spike in in offensive contributions…

Points Per-Game Average

First 13 Games: 0.38
Last 5 Games: 1.80

Halifax, who at one point this year were just 3-7, eventually just qualified for the postseason and are currently just three wins away from becoming NLL champions.

3. Brad Kri

Age: 33
Team: Toronto Rock
Stat Line: 1 G, 8 A, 127 LB, 33 CTO, 13 BLK
Acquired: Signed as unrestricted free agent Dec. 28, 2015
From: Acton, ON

Toronto’s Brad Kri is the only defensemen in the league to make our season-ending Top 5 in every season since rebooting the TLM brand five years ago. Over that time the Toronto Rock have seen several defenders come and go, while others have missed significant time due to injury. Kri has been here for virtually every Rock game for a full decade now, and is easily one of the team’s most relied on players over that span too. For the first time in his career, Kri led the NLL in caused turnovers. Since the NLL started tracking that stat in 2011, exactly half of the league’s DPOTY also led in CTO, including the last two (Matt Hossack in 2025 and Ryan Dilks in 2024). He also finished 12th in the NLL for loose ball among non-face-off guys this year, although he did pitch in with 20 draws this year before the Rock traded for Nick Rowlett to replace the MIA TD Ierlan. The only thing keeping Kri out of our Top 2 this year, was his teammate Phil Mazzuca, who prior to his season-ending injury, we had ranked as Toronto highest rated defender. Kri was nominated for the league’s DPOTY award for the third time in his career, and should seriously contend, not only for his NLL-leading body of work this year, but because he’s long (really fucking long) overdue for legit league-wide recognition.

Mitch de Snoo, Buffalo Bandits (Photo: Caroline Sherman)

2. Mitch de Snoo

Age: 33
Team: Buffalo Bandits
Stat Line: 3 G, 8 A, 144 LB, 18 CTO, 30 BLK
Acquired: Traded from Philadelphia to Buffalo Nov. 26, 2025
From: Oshawa, ON

Two things likely kept Mitch de Snoo off the league’s official DPOTY Finalists list, which included Callum Jones, Brad Kri and Ryan Dilks. Firstly, de Snoo missed four games due to injury. As we’ve highlighted in our NLL Player Rankings analysis before, eventual season-ending award winners rarely miss a GP, and anything more than two missed games usually keeps them out of the conversation. The second reason; he played for the Buffalo Bandits, who took a while to get going this year, is the team everyone outside of Banditland wants to see stumble, and saw fewer award finalist this year than they have in quite a while. So why does de Snoo rank so high here? Well…

With 14 out of a possible 18 games played, de Snoo easily meets out two-thirds GP criteria for inclusion. While many league voters likely simply sort season-ending stat leaderboards to decide on who they’re voting for, well, de Snoo wasn’t also right at the very top due to those four previously mentioned missed games, but…

Mitch de Snoo Straight Stats

LB: 144 (7th)
CTO: 18 (24th)
BLK: 30 (2nd)

Firstly, even at 18 games played, the above final line would be highly envied by most, but then…

Mitch de Snoo Per-Game Stats

LB: 10.29 (3rd)
CTO: 1.29 (9th)
BLK: 2.14 (2nd)

Few former DPOTY come anywhere close to those league-wide rankings. When it comes to D data, no one was as statistically productive as de Snoo, who was also a major difference maker for the Bandits in 2026. Buffalo were 11-3 with de Snoo in the lineup (a .786 W% that would have had Buffalo in first) and 0-4 without him, losing every game this year when he was in the press box. That’s not a coincidence.

Callum Jones, Ottawa Black Bears (Photo: Ryan McCullough)

1. Callum Jones

Age: 27
Team: Ottawa Black Bears
Stat Line: 3 G, 8 A, 173 LB, 32 CTO, 11 BLK
Acquired: 2023 NLL Entry Draft (3rd overall)
From: Burlington, ON

Callum Jones was our highest ranked defenseman from Day 1 this year and remains there in our season-ending awards edition of The Lax Mag’s NLL Player Rankings. The only way Jones loses the league’s DPOTY award is if Ottawa’s disappointing, playoff-less season is held against him, and in this league, that oddly often happens for these individual player honours. Jones is a pestering pain in the ass in Ottawa’s own end, playing physical and at times abusive defense against the opposition’s very best offensive talents. He finished tied for second in caused turnovers and third in loose balls across the league. The last time a DPOTY winner ranked that high in those two important D-specific stats was Graeme Hossack in 2018 (1st and 3rd). Prior to that, no one came close. The Black Bears allowed the fourth fewest SOG during the regular season, subtracting 63 shots on target (approx. four fewer shots per game) from a season earlier. While much of that can be contributed to the team’s underrated defensive unit (Brent Noseworthy just missed Top 5 mention in our Rising Player of the Year analysis), Jones obviously played a big part in the team’s shrinking SOG total. In 2026, Jones set career highs for goals, assists, points, shots, loose balls, caused turnovers, went double digits in blocks again, and significantly reduced his sin-bin minutes. From a league-wide, team-specific and personal-best perspective, no NLL defender’s résumé matched what Callum Jones this year, and he most definitely deserves to be 2026’s Defensive Player of the Year.