September 6, 2010
Poskay was simply the best in 2010
by Scott Souza/
Matt Poskay of the Boston Cannons enjoyed an outstanding 2010 season, earning MVP and Offensive Player of the Year honors. (photo: Boston Cannons)
Matt Poskay felt them all around him entering this season.
The question marks. The ones about his health after a battle with testicular cancer last year that cost him half the season and drained him of his explosiveness and endurance the other half. The ones about whether he could make the switch from midfield to attack full-time for the Boston Cannons for the first time since he set the high school goal-scoring record a decade earlier.
Those around Poskay may not have posed those questions. His teammates and coaches understood what Poskay endured last year and why his play never made it to 2008 Team MVP levels, even after a stunning midseason return. They had confidence that his off-the-ball talents and deadly shooting ability would translate wonderfully to the attack on a team that lost five of its top six scoring attackmen from last year.
But that didn’t stop Poskay from feeling he had something to prove to himself, his teammates and to the disease that may have slowed him, but could not stop him.
“They had to wonder when I suited up if I didn’t lose a step,” he said. “When you saw my name on the sheet, there had to be question marks of what type of player I’d be this year. What type of effect did the cancer have?”
Any question marks anyone had about Poskay -- or any he had about himself – were answered in historic fashion. The switch to attack proved a brilliant success. His 45 regular-season goals set a Cannons single-season record and were 20 more than the next-highest scorer in Major League Lacrosse.
He was named the Warrior MLL Offensive Player of the Year. He was named the Bud Light Most Valuable Player in the league. He was back and, inarguably, better than ever.
“I thought he would definitely have success this year at attack being the type of player he is,” Cannons coach Bill Daye said. “He has a great quarterback back there with him in Ryan Boyle, so I thought he would have a good year. But was I thinking 45 goals and 52 points? Definitely not.”
Poskay scored four or more goals seven times in the regular season and, at times, made finding the net look ridiculously easy with his array of pinpoint and over-the-shoulder shots. Playing as part of a devastating offense that included 2009 league MVP Paul Rabil in the midfield and elite feeder Boyle up front, he often found himself shockingly free around the crease for a player with nearly twice as many goals as anyone else in the league.
“He’s a real nice fit on the attack,” Boyle said. “He is an incredible shooter. But he doesn’t get enough credit for how smart he is as a player. People think off-the-ball players just stand there and shoot. But they have to get open. He knows how to do that.”
As simple as things appeared on the field for him this summer, the road Poskay took to raise his game was decidedly arduous. Following the diagnosis of a disease he knows could have killed him, Poskay went through surgery and treatments that sapped him of his energy; while he returned to score 15 goals in the season’s final seven games, he felt he had been reduced to just a fraction of the player he could be.
“When I came back last year, I tried to give everything I had and my body wouldn’t let me,” he said. “It always felt like I didn’t have much in the tank.”
Poskay tried to handle his illness as privately as possible; there were some around him who didn’t even know what was going on until he returned. When he did come back, he felt he had to win back the faith in his abilities that it had taken years to build.
“A guy like Ryan Boyle is a great assist guy and I had to make sure I was on the same page with him when we were on the field together this year,” he said. “Last year, when I played with him, I wasn’t healthy. So this year, would he trust me enough to throw me the ball? Maybe he wouldn’t.”
Boyle did trust Poskay, of course. And when Poskay caught it, and shot it, that ball turned into a goal a remarkable 46 percent of the time.
“He’s always been a good shooter and a good finisher going back to his time at Virginia,” Daye said. “He’s almost like a Canadian with the way he can put the ball in the back of the net. It’s because he practices shooting. Three, four times a week, that’s what he does. That’s something not enough guys do. We don’t practice every day, so a lot falls on these guys’ shoulders to go out and do it themselves, and he does it.”
In fact, he has done it better than any player in Cannons’ history. Poskay’s 140 goals in 51 career regular-season games are a record for the 10-year-old franchise. Daye’s first draft pick as coach -- he took Poskay in the second round of the 2006 draft and the team had traded away its top pick that year -- has been a franchise mainstay who, fittingly, had his best year during a regular season when the Cannons romped to the best record in the MLL.
“I make a point to talk with all the players coming into the season,” Daye said. “When I met with Matt, my thought was first and foremost to make sure he was healthy and cancer-free. Then we talked about his move to attack and what we were looking for out of him there.
“The league now is a place where midfielders dodge up top, and that creates openings for the attack. A guy like Matt feeds off that; he puts himself in position to take advantage of it.”
Added Poskay on his move to attack: “The only big transition was now you are seeing the play come to you instead of being involved in creating the play. You look for an opening and you have to wait for the play to find you instead of forcing the opening.”
Those openings around the crease are not the only ones Poskay has taken advantage of in the past year. While he was still recovering from the cancer treatments, the Clark, N.J., resident accepted a job as a college assistant at Drew University in Madison, N.J.
“He handled it extremely well,” Drew head coach Tom Leanos said. “Early on, you could see it still affected him with the shock of the cancer and the treatments. When he was having a treatment, that would really drain him, so he would let us know and we would have a morning practice so he could do his thing the rest of the day. … But as the season went on, you could see him getting stronger.”
“By the middle of the season he was out there working with our players and even running the core-strength workouts. And you know he loves to shoot, and we had three goalies to warm up, so he’s out there taking a hundred shots a day on them.”
Leanos said Poskay’s influence is a boon to both the program and the school.
“A guy of his stature brings a lot of star power to a small college like ours,” he said of the Division 3 program. “But not only is he a great player, he’s a great offensive mind as well. He helped us accomplish a lot of things this season.”
Those accomplishments continued onto the turf at Harvard Stadium this spring and summer as Poskay took on his new position and tore up the MLL.
The question marks are all gone now, replaced by good health and a collection of scoring marks unmatched in franchise history.
