It's Not The Arena

If I hear one more person complain about how the Islanders need a new arena to attract free agents, I'm going to puke.

As I write this, I'm watching a Vintage Game on the NHL Network from 1983. The Islanders are playing the Bruins in Game 6 of the Wales Conference Finals. The Islanders are winning by a score of 7-3 and the crowd is boisterious. As we all know, the Isles go on to win the game, the series, and their fourth straight Stanley Cup. But that's not the point.

This is the point. The Coliseum is every bit of a dump now as it was in 1983. Yet, people have packed the place at any point when the team has been good. It was full in the 80s. It was full in 1993 and it was full in 2002. It's obvious that if there's a product worth watching, fans will turn out in great numbers to watch it. Look at the Mets. Shea Stadium is the most awful stadium in all of professional sports, but they've set attendance records in each of the past two years. They've also attracted premier free agents, and these players would have signed even if CitiField wasn't on the horizon.

So, getting back to the Islanders, what's the problem? If it's not the arena, it's got to be something else. In this case, that "something else" is the quality of the team. Sorry to say it, but it's true. The proverbial elephant in the room for the Islanders is the fact that their "youth movement" is a misnomer. Their organizational depth is average; worse, there's nobody on the team that can really help bring this talent along for the long haul. There are a lot of teams with a lot more depth and a better plan to develop their prospects. That's just the way it is.

I'm not trying to be critical of the Islanders. That said, I'm sick of the excuses that always seem to pop up when things go wrong. When things went awry last year, it was because there were too many injuries. Never mind the fact that the Islanders were in ninth place or worse for the final six weeks of the season. It's not that they were screwed; they just weren't good enough. The same goes for the prior season's playoff against Buffalo. Maybe it's not what fans want to hear, but the truth is the Islanders are nowhere near the league's elite.

You don't need excuses when you win. And when you're winning, the good players want to play for you. Two years ago, Pittsburgh was a last-place team in a crappy arena on the verge of being shipped off to Kansas City. Now, they're one of the best teams and, as a result, a top destination for free agents. The Devils used to play in a half-empty dump, but still drew free agents because they're always competitive. Now that they play in a half-empty palace, players have the exact same level of interest. If the Islanders had just won the Stanley Cup, do you really think players would spurn the Isles because they play in subpar facilities? I highly doubt it.

Again, it's not the arena. It's the team. If the Islanders want to get the best players, they need to build slowly and wisely. This year, if they're in 10th place again at the trading deadline and they still have Mike Comrie, Mike Sillinger, Bill Guerin, and Doug Weight in the final year of their contracts, then they should suck it up and get what they can get for these players. As much as I love Garth Snow for going for it with the Ryan Smyth deal, the Islanders need to be smart. Within a year or two, they could be a very good young organization. They just need to know who to build around. That would be Kyle Okposo and Rick DiPietro, not The Lighthouse.

Where the Islanders Went Wrong...

When you title a post "Where the Islanders Went Wrong," you could conceivably take unlimited cheap shots at their collective abdomen, mentioning hiring Mike Millbury, any of his trades (turns out Oleg Kvasha and Mark Parrish aren't as talented as Roberto Luongo and Olli Jokinen), talking about how people with no money bought a multi-million dollar franchise, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I won't do that. I will rise above that level.

I also won't be talking about the signing of "character players" like Josef Vasicek and Jon Sim, and how we were told it's because of their heart and grit that they were signed, as opposed to the real reason that no one wants to play for the Islanders (except, for some reason, Bryan McCabe).

I want to talk about how Garth Snow messed up at the trade deadline this year.

I'm not anti-Snow. Sure, I thought it was a joke when Blogger Bryan texted me about them firing Neil Smith and promoting their back-up goalie (much like me texting him "Isles trade DP to Ottawa for Eaves, Corvo and 2 1st rounders"), but I think he isn't an awful GM, especially compared to Millbury. 

When he traded the farm for Ryan Smyth, he did what he had to do. The opportunity came up, he swung the deal. The grand prize wound up being a few weekday sell-outs and 2 extra home games, but he did what he had to because he felt he had a team worthy of making the playoffs.

This year, he completely dropped the ball. He had to have known Rick DiPietro was hurt, unless he wasn't watching Versus during the skills competition when DP said into his mic "Fucked up my hip." 

A bunch of his veterans, including key faceoff man Mike Sillinger, were hurt, and the ones that weren't should have been shipped out to make way for the future, not held onto in a pathetic, desperate, unintentionally funny attempt to make the playoffs.

The NHL is simple and cyclic (except for the Red Wings). Teams are bad, stay bad a few years, get high draft picks, sell off overpriced vets for more picks and prospects, have a few okay years, get good. Read the book on the Penguins (Fleury, Whitney, Crosby, Malkin, and Staal were all Top 5 picks). 

When teams are good, they don't stay good for very long because of what they sacrificed to be there. The Rangers won the Cup in 1994 and Neil Smith gave up a lot for that, even noting that they would be bad for a while when he did it, and they were. Tampa Bay won in 2004, then signed Conn Smythe winner Brad Richards to a huge deal. So big, in fact, that had to let their goalie go. They then paid 4 players so much that they couldn't sign or keep any role players (see: Pavel Kubina moving to Toronto).

Then, there are teams that are bad but won't admit it. Teams like the 1998-2003 Rangers, or the current Maple Leafs. The Maple Leafs should have had a firesale, but their players wouldn't waive no-trade clauses (bad management in John Ferguson, Jr.) and then they played decent down the stretch, giving them slight, slight hope for a top-8 seeding. The Rangers thought they were always one big name away from glory, so they spent the money they had and it brought nothing. They never re-built from within until 2004, when the upcoming CBA gave them no choice.

The Islanders were a bad team last year, even when they were winning. Mike Comrie will never be more than a 2nd line center on other teams. Sillinger shouldn't be playing 19 minutes a night at age 36. Hell, at age 26 he shouldn't have been. Miro Satan is not a top-line winger or your go-to guy with an empty net.

Yet, the Islanders stood pat. They didn't sell for the future. A team like Ottawa would have loved Satan, who would have contributed more than Cory Stillman eventually did for them. Ruslan Fedotenko is a proven playoff performer, scoring both goals in the Lightning's 2-1 Game 7 win over Calgary in the '04 Finals. He could have been a useful player in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia (instead of Vinny Prospal) or Dallas. Vasicek will never score 40 goals, but Nashville could have used him again (instead of Jan Hlavac) or maybe Calgary to give a pop to their offense.

They had no studs to trade away, no Smyth's, Marian Hossa's or Cristobal Huet's, but they could have fetched a 2nd and 4th rounder for Satan, and a 3rd rounder for Tank and Vasicek. This is a very deep draft, and those picks could have turned into something more than what they got for trading Marc-Andre Bergeron.