By Budd Bailey, Buffalo Sports Page Columnist

No. 34: February 28, 2018 – The Bandits trade Callum Crawford and a second-round draft choice in 2019 to New England for Shawn Evans and a fourth-round draft choice in 2018.

Shawn Evans was the Most Valuable Player in the National Lacrosse League two different times for two different teams – 2013 for Calgary and 2015 for New England. So why were the Black Wolves willing to talk about trading a player like that? It was hard to know, although Evans had lost the title of captain in New England under somewhat odd circumstances.

Bandits general manager Steve Dietrich wasn’t sure what was going on, but he was willing to pick up the phone and ask about Evans. Dietrich thought his team was a little too passive, and saw Evans as a cure. From there a deal was completed: Evans came to Buffalo for Callum Crawford, with draft picks completing the transaction.

Evans didn’t get the Bandits out of their funk in 2018, as they missed the playoff for the second straight year. But Buffalo was better in 2019, and Evans was a big reason why. In fact at one point in the season, Evans was second in the NLL in scoring. Who was first? Crawford. It was one of those rare times when the two top scorers in the league had been traded for each other. We’ll see what happens to the players involved in the coming years – especially since Evans was exposed in the expansion draft.

(Follow Budd on Twitter @WDX2BB)

Budd Bailey

Budd Bailey has been involved in almost every aspect of the local sports scene for the last 40 years. He worked for WEBR Radio, the Buffalo Sabres' public relations department and The Buffalo News during that time. In that time he covered virtually every aspect of the area's sports world, from high schools to the Bills and Sabres and everything in between. Along the way, Budd served as a play-by-play announcer for the Bisons, an analyst for the Stallions, and a talk-show host. He won the National Lacrosse League's Tom Borrelli Award as the media personality of the year in 2011, and was a finalist for that same award in 2017. Budd's seventh and eighth books, one on the Transcontinental Railroad and the other about Ichiro Suzuki, are scheduled to be released in the fall.

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