San Diego went top of the West with their win over Atlanta but Seattle had a bye and have a game in hand. Seattle are the only undefeated team in the league. In the East it’s New England who go clear at the top with their defeat of New York and Atlanta’s loss to San Diego.
Seattle remain the only undefeated team in the league after defeating Houston on the weekend. Nakai Penny started for the Seawolves. They are one point clear of San Diego in the West standings.
In the East, New York, Atlanta and New England are tied atop the standings with 10 points. Toronto won their first match of the season and are tied with New Orleans at the bottom of the standings.
With Toronto and New England having byes, teams that have the most Canadian players on the roster, there were only 13 Canadians in action this weekend, and only 4 starters.
Week 2 kicked off on Friday with Seattle claiming their second win of the season. We’ve listed the Canadian players in the rosters for week 1 and 2. We’ll add the rosters for Sunday when they become available.
Of the 60 Canadian players listed on the 12 MLR teams 17 started, 18 were in reserve and 25 didn’t get onto the rosters in Week 1. The Canadian players are listed in the match results below.
We listed below the Canadian players, we believe, who will be playing in MLR 2023. We compiled the list from Wiki and also Americas Rugby News, who seem an up to date source. There are 59 players on the list with Toronto, as expected, having the largest number of Canadians. New England, surprisingly, is amassing an impressive number of Canadians in their roster.
The MLR schedule for 2023 has been published, the link is here: www.majorleague.rugby/schedules/
There are 18 weeks with each team getting 16 matches, 8 home and 8 away. The regular season wraps up June 18th.
The MLR officially confirmed the Giltinis from LA and the Gilronis from Austin will be out of the MLR competition in 2023. Both teams, owned by Australian Adam Gilchrist, were kicked out of the playoffs last year due to, apparently, violating league rules. These violations were wideley considered to be salary cap violations, exceeding the league rules on player salaries. LA and Austin were the top two teams in the standings in the Western Conference and were contenders for the title. LA had a number of Canadian players including DTH, Lindsey Stevens, Ben Lesage, Djustice Sears-Duru and Corey Thomas.
There were four Canadians drafted in Round 1, Cali Martinez went as 3rd pick to DC, Seth Purdey went to Atlanta as 4th pick, Owain Ruttan was 5th pick by Toronto and Ethan Hager went 8th pick to Dallas.
Canada placed two players on the MLR 2nd XV team, missing out on the 1st XV and the honorable mentions. Cole Keith was selected loosehead prop and Andrew Coe on the wing. Neither player was in the match 23 against Belgium last weekend.