Trade: Bandits bring Resetarits home to fuel offense
MATT VOLZ
Editor in Chief
As the Bandits enter their final six games of the regular season, two players will join the team to help a potential playoff push.
One of them is a younger depth piece on defense, while the other is an old friend brought in to jumpstart the offense.
Just after 3 p.m. today, Buffalo announced that they had traded a sixth-round pick to the Calgary Roughnecks in exchange for defenseman Tyler Hendrycks.
The 24-year-old is in his third NLL season after being drafted in the second round in 2022 by the Toronto Rock.
Hendrycks can play both transition and defense, so he should add depth and versatility to a team that sometimes falls into the trap of leaning too heavily on key players.
General Manager Steve Dietrich wasn’t done yet, though.
About an hour later, the team announced a trade with the Philadelphia Wings that will bring Joe Resetarits back home to Buffalo.
In the deal, the Bandits are sending young forward Lukas Nielsen and a 2026 second-round pick.
Nielsen, 21, was drafted seventh overall by the Bandits in 2024.
He hasn’t been able to find a consistent spot in the team’s lineup, though, and he’s scored just two goals in six career games.
He goes to a rebuilding Wings team, who in turn sends Resetarits to the Bandits for a reunion.
Resetarits, a Hamburg native, played for Buffalo for nearly two seasons earlier in his career.
He’s been in the league a while and is a former top draft pick, as he was selected 6th overall by the Roughnecks in 2012.
He played just 14 games with Calgary, though, before joining the Bandits the following season.
In the 2014 season, Resetarits scored 25 goals and totaled 42 points, serving as one of the team’s top offensive contributors.
That offense slowed down in the playoffs, however.
Resetarits had just one goal and five points in Buffalo’s playoff run, which ended in a loss to the eventual champion Rochester Knighthawks in the Eastern Division Final.
By the way, Matt Vinc was the goalie for the Knighthawks.
In 2015, Resetarits recorded 21 points in 10 games before being sent to Rochester in a midseason trade.
The trade seemed to light a fire underneath him, as he recorded 27 points in the team’s final seven games, leading them to the playoffs.
Rochester’s quest for a fourth straight championship was denied, however, as they fell to the Rock in the Eastern Division Final.
Resetarits enjoyed a few more productive seasons as a Knighthawk, including a 37-goal, 100-point campaign in 2018.
During another successful season in 2019, Resetarits was traded again, this time to the New England Black Wolves.
New England would reach the playoffs, but Resetarits fell victim to his old team, as the Bandits took them down in the Eastern Division Semifinal.
In 2020, Resetarits recorded 44 points in 11 games for the Black Wolves before COVID-19 shut the season down in March.
The 2021 season was cancelled altogether, and the Black Wolves relocated to Albany to become the FireWolves.
In his first season calling MVP Arena home, Resetarits exploded into one of the league’s top scorers.
He scored 47 goals in the 2022 season, tied with Toronto’s Tom Schreiber and Georgia’s Lyle Thompson for the most in the league.
His 111 points were third-best in the league, behind only Dhane Smith with 135 and Colorado’s Ryan Lee with 119.
The young FireWolves reached the postseason, only to fall to the Bandits in the Eastern Division Semifinal.
The stellar season wasn’t enough to keep Resetarits around, though, as he went to the Philadelphia Wings in the offseason.
He immediately became Philadelphia’s top scorer, putting up 41 goals and 110 points on a team that missed the playoffs.
His production dipped slightly the next season, but he still recorded 37 goals and 95 points while missing the playoffs again.
Last season, he was back to peak performance, scoring 41 goals and reaching a career-high 121 points.
Again, though, the Wings missed the playoffs.
So far this season, his numbers haven’t been quite as spectacular, but they’re still pretty good.
Through 12 games in Philadelphia, Resetarits has scored 15 goals and totaled 45 points.
Once again, the Wings are well out of the playoff picture, so this trade seems like a case of the team doing right by a veteran player and allowing him a shot to compete for a championship.
At 36 years old, Resetarits knows he doesn’t have many seasons left to compete in the NLL.
While the Bandits haven’t looked like a team good enough to win a fourth straight title for most of the season, they’ve gotten themselves back on track with back-to-back wins over Saskatchewan and Toronto.
Resetarits will look to give his hometown team a boost when the Bandits return home to face the Colorado Mammoth at 7:30 p.m. on Friday.
Stats for this story were provided by nllstats.com, a league-wide database run by NLL writer Graeme Perrow.
Check out his commentary on nllchatter.com as well as his updates on X (@GraemePerrow).
