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Max Adler needed some reassurance before he officially signed with the Buffalo Bandits last month.

He was excited for the opportunity, sure, but trepidation remained. He was a top-tier faceoff athlete in the field game but had never played box lacrosse in his life. Was he taking a roster spot from someone who deserved it more? Did he really earn this?

He called one of his teammates from the Premier Lacrosse League’s Chaos LC, Buffalo forward Josh Byrne, who offered comforting words. It wouldn’t be awkward at all. The Bandits just wanted someone who could win draws. They just wanted to win.

Even with that counsel, Adler wasn’t prepared for how welcoming the Bandits would be when he arrived for his first game.

“Guys who were scratched, who I was playing in front of and definitely deserve to be out there more than me, are giving me their pads and helping me put my pads on like I was a little kid going to hockey tryouts,” Adler said. “I didn’t even know how to put my pads on, and everyone on the team was just so helpful.”

Adler has lived up to his side of the bargain, too. He sits just under 40 percent on draws through his first three games in the National Lacrosse League, an enormous improvement for a Buffalo team that struggled at the faceoff X in the early stages of the season.

“We’ve tracked his draws over the last three weeks,” Bandits general manager Steve Dietrich said. “There’s been at least seven times in both games where he was credited with a loss that we should have come up with the loose ball. His numbers should be even better. We couldn’t be more happy with what he’s done for us.”

Adler first got on Dietrich’s radar this summer thanks to his PLL affiliation. The former Bentley star was drafted by the Chaos last year following the merger of the PLL and Major League Lacrosse, bringing him to a team Dietrich watched closely thanks to numerous Bandit connections.

Adler missed out on his first chance at the NLL, with an invite to San Diego Seals camp getting wiped out when the pandemic shut down the 2021 season, but Dietrich saw the potential.

“You started to watch Max and you saw how competitive he was against some of the other elite guys like [TD] Ierlan, [Joe] Nardella and [Jake] Withers,” Dietrich said. “I thought he was great for the Chaos in the playoffs.”

Few Americans have played for the Bandits in the franchise’s history, let alone Americans with zero prior box experience. Buffalo head coach John Tavares values his players practicing together during the week, putting an emphasis on those who are based near Buffalo or are willing to relocate.

Relocation was on the table when the Bandits first reached out to Adler. Dietrich called in the fall with interest in him attending camp and moving to Buffalo, adding opportunities to learn the box game. But as the pandemic began to wane, Adler’s work as a financial analyst with ESPN started transitioning back to the office. Add in a needed recovery period after a long PLL playoff run, and a move to the NLL didn’t seem in the cards this year.

“What I thought was, ‘OK, I’ll really make a run at it next year,’” Adler said.

Meanwhile, the Bandits went for a faceoff-by-committee approach to little success. Buffalo still won six of its first seven games but lost the faceoff battle every time. It became a clear weakness to Dietrich and the coaching staff.

“We quickly realized in crucial moments in a game you really need to have that ball,” Tavares said. “Especially the last five minutes of a game.”

The breaking point came on February 12 against the Toronto Rock, Buffalo’s first defeat. Ierlan won 25 of the 26 draws he took against the Bandits in a 12-10 final.

With the team set to match up with one of the top three faceoff men in the league — Nardella, Withers and Trevor Baptiste — six times in the following seven games, it was time to make an exception and fly in a faceoff specialist. Dietrich made the call to Adler, who signed on February 17 and suited up a day later against the Albany FireWolves.

“We were not expecting him to win every draw,” Dietrich said. “Just give us an opportunity. The high-end faceoff guys, we weren’t even getting an opportunity. They were winning it to themselves or winning it right to one of their guys.”

While his surroundings were new, the man across from Adler in his debut was as familiar as it gets. Adler and Nardella have trained together since Nardella was an assistant at Harvard and Adler a student at Bentley. Since then, they’ve battled as pros, including in the last PLL championship game, and worked alongside each other with Faceoff Factory.

Adler won 32 percent of his draws in his first game, a mark he’s exceeded in both outings since. He went 48 percent against Rochester and improved to 38 percent in his second meeting against Nardella, who tops the NLL with a 71-percent success rate.

Last week, he won a draw against Albany that allowed Buffalo to score on its first possession of overtime.

His shooting percentage, meanwhile, is a sterling 100 percent after hitting on a penalty shot late in the Bandits’ 14-8 victory against Rochester on February 26.

“[Tavares] told me to go take the penalty shot, and I thought he was joking,” Adler said. “He’s like, ‘No, go take it and score.’ I’m like, ‘Alright, I’ll try my best.’ I didn’t even know the rules. I asked the ref since there were four seconds on the clock if I had to score in those four seconds. … Honestly, all I was hoping for was that they’d blow the whistle before I had a chance to actually shoot the ball or cradle it out of my stick.”

He exceeded his own expectations, pump-faking once to create space for a low shot to the back of the net. Chase Fraser and Dhane Smith, two of his Chaos teammates, ran onto the floor to celebrate with him. He’s a part of the Bandits brotherhood now.

“I wouldn’t even say it’s a dream come true because it didn’t even seem realistic,” Adler said of his NLL opportunity. “It’s not even something that I dreamt about because I didn’t think it was a possibility.”