Mitch de Snoo picked up a loose ball following a Matt Vinc save and spun away from a Georgia Swarm player, dropping him to the KeyBank Center floor with his ankle-breaking move. Four days earlier, his career had been at a standstill.
De Snoo’s highlight-reel assist was just one moment in a wild six-day span that began as a member of the Philadelphia Wings and ended back with his original team in Buffalo – all while balancing his pursuit of a medical career at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
DE SNOO TAKING ANKLES… 😱#LetsGoBandits | @mitchdesnoo pic.twitter.com/gXajIM4cT3
— Buffalo Bandits (@NLLBandits) November 30, 2025
Bandits.com caught up with the Bandits defenseman to revisit his busy week surrounding last Saturday’s season opener.
Wednesday – The trade
De Snoo woke up still a member of the Philadelphia Wings, working through the arbitration process after being franchise tagged earlier in August.
Though his lacrosse career was temporarily paused, the demands of his medical career kept him plenty busy. De Snoo is training to be a clinician scientist and currently works on a pediatrics rotation, consisting of long shifts at the hospital in Toronto.
He was a few hours into his shift at SickKids when a call came from his agent around 11:30 a.m., informing him he’d been acquired by Buffalo for a pair of conditional draft picks.
“It was quite the relief to hear that I was gonna be able to play lacrosse again,” de Snoo said.
Balancing his patients and eagerness to join his former team at practice that night, de Snoo went through the rest of his shift with a newfound jolt of energy.
De Snoo – an Oshawa, Ontario product who played collegiately at Drexel University – received a biomedical engineering degree at his alma mater in 2015. He then earned his master’s degree from the University of Toronto in laboratory medicine and pathology in 2017.
In 2019, de Snoo began his combined eight-year MD/PhD program and completed the latter in 2024 with his PhD in neuroscience. He’s currently back in medical school in year seven of eight doing his clerkship program which rotates through various areas of medicine.
“I’m in clinics every day and right now being on pediatrics, I go in and see patients and then do my best to come up with a management plan,” de Snoo said. “That’s all reviewed with the staff pediatricians who make the final call on anything. I would have been seeing patients in the clinic that day. It was hard to get away and look at my phone and try and focus on work. It was challenging. It was a lot of mixed emotions there, and excited to get it resolved.”
Though not yet medically cleared due to needing a physical to join his teammates on the practice floor, de Snoo left work around 5 p.m. and drove 27 miles to watch his Bandits teammates practice at Brampton Memorial Arena.
De Snoo – who played with the Bandits from 2016 to 2020 – reunited with his former coach John Tavares and many of his former teammates such as Josh Byrne, Dhane Smith, Ian MacKay, Nick Weiss, Josh Byrne, Steve Priolo and Ryan Benesch.
When de Snoo arrived shortly after 6 p.m., he walked into the film room to find everyone already there. He stood at the door and cracked a laugh which fed into the rest of the room, erasing the need for an introduction to watch his Bandits teammates practice at Brampton Memorial Arena.
“There’s a lot of familiarity,” de Snoo said. “I played for JT [John Tavares] and Chugger [Steve Dietrich] before and then there’s a lot of players that I played with all those years ago. It was interesting to meet the new guys. I had no idea about the young guys coming up, and then to see their depth and their speed and their desire is exciting moving forward.”
Thursday – A shift of relief
An official member of a new team, de Snoo returned to work for a 9-5 shift at the hospital.
De Snoo saw patients on that Thursday as his mind raced between treatments and lacrosse. De Snoo’s doctor-by-day, lacrosse-by-night balance is one that few of his co-workers know about.
That day, de Snoo worked in the pediatric endocrinology clinic and saw patients in a walk-in setting, going from room to room and chart to chart. At the end of his workday, he returned to his Toronto home where he cut up film in preparation for the season opener.
Friday – Oh hey, roommate!
De Snoo spent the day working and eagerly awaiting his P-1A visa, which was required in order to play the following night.
The visa finally came in the early evening, slightly delaying his arrival to Buffalo.
He got to the hotel at 9 p.m. and quickly went to sleep – until the door opened at 12:30 a.m.
In walked Connor Farrell – the Bandits’ faceoff special, lively personality, and de Snoo’s new roommate.
The two met there for the first time, set to play as teammates less than 24 hours later.
“My flight got delayed three hours,” Farrell said. “I walk in and he was sleeping. I didn’t know who it was. I’m trying to figure out, look, and he woke up, he introduced himself. It was cool meeting for the first time. At 12:30 in the morning. He’s a great dude. He played great too.”
Saturday: A record-breaking return to Banditland
De Snoo started his gameday with an hour of medical studies, team breakfast at the hotel, then an hour-long video session leading into shootaround.
After lunch ended, de Snoo returned to the hotel to rest and continue his studies. He walked back to the arena hours before game time to have his physical and be cleared by the Bandits doctors.
He wondered how his skills would translate, having not yet practiced with the team.
“It was definitely a challenge not having a single practice in there,” de Snoo said. “Was worried about being rusty and being able to respond. Stick skills and being confident handling the ball were things that I was concerned about going in because I was doing my best to be ready to go.
“I’m training every day. I felt like I was in good shape, but actual live gameplay and reacting to other players is not something that you can mimic when you’re training on your own.”
De Snoo and Benesch were the lone Bandits watching the banner raising from afar as their teammates crowned a third consecutive NLL championship.
While de Snoo watched the pyrotechnics and the sold-out crowd of over 19,000 at KeyBank Center donned in orange and black, the notion of winning a championship became real again – something he fell short of doing in Buffalo in 2016 and 2019.
The 33-year-old is one of the most accomplished defensive players in NLL history, ranking fifth all time with 72 blocked shots and having won Defensive Player of the Year in 2021-22. Winning a championship is the one benchmark he’s still chasing.
“It’s hard to put into words, that’s the reason you play the game,” de Snoo said. “You play the game to win. … I’ve been close before and that feeling of just coming up a little bit short is one of the worst feelings that you can have in sports. I know this is an excellent team with the potential to do it, but we’re early in the season here. We’re just getting started.”
De Snoo dominated in his return to Banditland and looked like a defenseman who spent all of training camp with his teammates. The 2022 NLL Defensive Player of the Year recorded one goal, one assist, two created turnovers, four blocked shots and 11 loose ball recoveries in Buffalo’s 15-11 win.
De Snoo became the fifth player in NLL history to record 10-plus loose ball recoveries, 3-plus blocked shots, 2-plus created turnovers, 1 goal and 1 assist in a single game and is the third player to ever accomplish the feat more than once.
Tavares said de Snoo was “all over the floor” defensively and later added he was able to adjust quickly due to the system that shared some similarity to his first stint in Buffalo.
In recognition of how he navigated the hectic process and his performance on the floor, de Snoo was awarded the heavyweight player of the game belt.
Happy to have you on our side! 👊
Mitch de Snoo is tonight’s Heavyweight Player of the Game! pic.twitter.com/ochcvDfwKj
— Buffalo Bandits (@NLLBandits) November 30, 2025
Sunday to Monday: A 24-hour shift
One of the NLL’s greatest defensemen was back on the road immediately following the game and drove back to Toronto. De Snoo was back home in bed at 1 a.m. and mentally prepared for a 24-hour “call shift” at the hospital.
He arrived at the hospital the next morning at 9 a.m.
While the hours are long, de Snoo’s medical pursuits are fueled by the influence of his parents. His dad was diagnosed with Parksinson’s when de Snoo was 12, and his mom worked as a nurse.
“I was always driven towards improving treatments and outcomes for people with diseases that we don’t really have any effective treatments for right now,” de Snoo said.
De Snoo worked for the next 23 hours with just one hour of sleep during his shift. De Snoo was both a sponge and an applicant during that time– using what he’s learned from experienced doctors and applying those methods with his patients.
“I’m adapting to what comes,” de Snoo said. “When it’s so busy like that it’s because things are happening that require attention right away. My role is as a learner, so I’m not necessarily the one making the life and death decisions, but I’m there trying to learn so that I could be a good clinician in the future. When there’s situations that require my attention or the staff pediatrician’s attention at all hours of the night, there’s a reason. Those things that get your attention keep you awake.
“It’s a privilege to be able to interact with people’s lives when they’re having some of their worst moments and try and help so it keeps you motivated and driven.”