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Following a 17 round regular season and two weeks of intense playoff action, the 2025 Major League Rugby Conference Champions have been declared and the MLR Shield awaits. The Eastern Conference Champion will face off against the Western Conference Champion in the 2025 Championship at Centreville Bank Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island to determine who will lift the 2025 Shield. Welcome back to Midweek Milestones!

This is NARDB’s weekly article that highlights and examines the standout stats from each round of MLR action! The purpose of this article is to bring attention to achievements, milestones, and standout stats achieved by players and teams throughout MLR with the aim to give them the recognition and applause they deserve. The penultimate article of the 2025 season will cover the two Conference Finals matchups. Because it only covers a pair of games, it is a shorter than average article, but hopefully one that is just as interesting!

The Championship Clash!

Following the Conference Finals last weekend, we now know the two teams that will fight it out to lift the 2025 MLR Shield! The New England Free Jacks claimed their 3rd straight Eastern Conference Championship with a 21-20 victory following a heartbreaking final minute missed penalty from the Chicago Hounds. The Free Jacks saw off the Miami Sharks in the Conference Semifinal, before defeating the Chicago Hounds in the Eastern Conference Final for the 2nd straight year to earn their 3rd Championship appearance in a row with a chance to lift their 3rd Shield in as many seasons and cement their legacy as a dynasty!

By contrast, before 2025 the Houston SaberCats had never won a Major League Rugby playoff game despite qualifying ever year since 2022, including as the top team in MLR in 2024. This year, the ‘Cats qualified 2nd in the Western Conference with a 10-6 record and 54pts (just 1pt behind the Free Jacks). Houston earned their first playoff victory over a spirited Rugby FC LA side in the Conference Semifinals, before dominating the top regular season team in the Western Conference Final, the Utah Warriors.

The SaberCats racked up 33pts on the road against the Warriors, scoring more points than any other team in the 2025 postseason, surpassing the 32pts scored by the New England Free Jacks in their victory over Miami which remains the biggest margin of victory in this year’s postseason so far. The SaberCats also became the first team to score 5 tries in a 2025 playoff game which, when added to their 4 tries from the Western Conference Semifinal, takes their playoff try total to 9 in 2025 compared to the Free Jacks’ 7. For those wondering, the MLR Playoff record for points in a game is 46, set by the Seattle Seawolves in a Conference Final victory against the Houston SaberCats in 2022. The Seawolves scored 6 tries in that game, and 12 postseason tries total that year, both also MLR records although the Chicago Hounds matched the record of 6 tries in a postseason game with their 21-45 victory over the NOLA Gold in last year’s Eastern Conference Semifinals.

A head-to-head comparison for the Championship can be found below, showing just how tight this clash is on paper. The New England Free Jacks look to have the advantage in the set piece (both scrums and lineouts), but concede far more penalties which the Houston SaberCats may want to consider exploiting with AJ Alatimu’s boot, given how few tries the Free Jacks conceded. Worth noting is the head-to-head record of these two sides. The Houston SaberCats have never defeated the Free Jacks, 0-4. The Championship game would be a great time to get their first!

Hilsenbeck Hits One Hundred!

Although the game definitely did not end the way that he or the Chicago Hounds hoped, former German international turned aspiring USA Eagle Chris Hilsenbeck still racked up half of the Hounds’ 20pts in the Eastern Conference Final. The 33yo fly-half scored 22pts in Chicago’s two playoff games this year, and was sat on 99pts scored this season heading into this game. This means that despite the Hounds’ defeat, Chris Hilsenbeck became the first (and so far, only) player to pass 100pts scored in the 2025 MLR season, and that still deserves some praise. Congratulations, Chris!

Chris Hilsenbeck now sits 13pts ahead of the next highest scorer, Joel Hodgson on 96pts for the Utah Warriors. With only the Championship Final left to play in the 2025 Major League Rugby Season, Hilsenbeck is almost guaranteed to finish as the League’s top scorer in 2025, and he has a good chance of being the only player in the entire league with over 100pts this year. Only AJ Alatimu with the Houston SaberCats has a realistic chance of also scoring 100. He is currently sat 9pts away on 91, so while 100pts is achievable, MLR’s all-time leading playoff scorer would need to score 19pts in what would be a Championship Performance for the ages to pass Hilsenbeck.

As an aside, Alatimu would need 16pts to become the first play in MLR history to reach 100pts scored in the playoffs. Additionally, he is currently MLR’s 2nd highest scorer all-time with 497pts scored in total so is almost guaranteed to become only the 2nd player ever to pass 500pts scored in MLR following Sam Windsor, who remains MLR’s all-time leading scorer on 595pts.

Wrapping Up

As mentioned in the introduction, with only two games in the Conference Finals, standout stats for this week’s Midweek Milestones are hard to come by, resulting in a shorter than usual article. Despite that, this article still took a deeper look at the match-up for the 2025 Championship Game and highlighted MLR’s first (and only) 100+ point scorer this season: Chris Hilsenbeck! Check in next week for a mini Midweek Milestones from the final game of the 2025 Major League Rugby season, the Championship game at Centreville Bank Stadium in Rhode Island!

Thank you for reading the final regular season edition of NARDB’s Midweek Milestones! This series will continue through the postseason, where we are bound to get plenty of standout stats! If you like this series, please get in touch on social media or share this article to help highlight these achievements! If there’s anything that has been missed that you feel is worth mentioning, you can reach out to NARDB via the ‘Contact’ tab on this site. Alternatively, you can reach out to NARDB or James on social media: @MLRStats on Instagram/Threads, @JamDelay & @NARugbyDB on Twitter/X, and @JamDelay & @NARDB on Bluesky! NARDB can also be found on YouTube, at NARStats!

Finally, If you’re looking to get your hands on some of the new Macron merch for 2025 or to add to your jersey collection, visit shopmlr.com to get your hands on all that new gear, and remember to use code ‘MLRSTATS’ at checkout for 15% off your order!