Monthly Archives: October 2008
9:30 am - Those vintage, royal blue Third Jerseys the Islanders are debuting on Saturday? They soon could come First.
Point Blank has learned that the Islanders are looking into the possibility of their old-new classic-style sweaters being their primary uniform of choice in 2009-10, or at latest the season after that.
Speculation leads to two reasons for the decision: the Islanders want to continue to re-connect with their fan base – which has almost unanimously rejoiced over the Third Jersey design. In addition, it simply looks far sharper than the team’s current Reebok uniform system.
The Islanders are holding a sale on the Third Jerseys from noon – 4 pm on Saturday at the Coliseum. Anyone buying the jersey at the sale receives a voucher for two complimentary tickets for when Monday’s game against Columbus.
More than that, you may be the owner of the Islanders’ primary jersey of the near future.
Reactions? Comments.
7:00 pm - A conversation with Doug Weight today revealed the many ways the veteran center feels about the fall-out from his hit on Carolina forward Brandon Sutter, the 19-year old son of former Islanders captain Brent Sutter.
As an Islander: “When I realized it was Brandon Sutter who was hurt, that’s the first thing I thought about: his connection to our team. That was just one of a lot of reasons why I felt so terrible about what happened.”
As a father: “I’m a father, a lot of us are fathers, Brent Sutter’s his dad. How can you not feel something? He’s a 19-year old kid just coming into the league. I did not have any malicious intent. I’ve heard that in some places and it’s wrong. The whole thing has been on my mind ever since. It affected me for days after – even during the Rangers game.”
As a Cup-winner with Carolina: “I know half that franchise. I talked to (medical trainer) Pete Friesen a few times on Sunday and we’re still in touch. I want to know how Brandon’s doing, I hope every day that he’s getting better.
“I’ve been texting with eight players on that team. I wanted to make sure they knew how I felt and I wanted updates on Brandon as soon as they heard anything. Those guys know how much this has been killing me, know the kind of player I am. It’s gotten to the point where a few of them have texted me, ‘Enough already! He’s gonna be okay. We’re good. Leave us alone’”!
As a former player under GM Jim Rutherford: “I read Jimmy’s comments and let me tell you for the record I agree with everything he said about hits to the head and the league choosing to not do anything about it. The only thing I disagree about what Jimmy said is that Brandon was vulnerable. That’s not true. He saw me coming and then made the split-second decision that he could get to the puck and make the play.”
As a hockey fan: “I saw on TSN where they did a Top Ten on violent hits in the wake of what happened Saturday. There was the play with Paul Kariya, the one with R.J. Umberger. In every single instance of their Top 10, every player was vulnerable. That’s not what happened Saturday.
“I knew it was going to be a good hit, but there was no malice. I’m going to check him and then he leans down into me. There’s so much speed out there. It’s a fast, spontaneous sport. Unless the league wants to outlaw open-ice hitting – obviously, some people like it – this can happen.”
As a fellow NHL player: “When the time is right, I may reach out to Brandon. I want to see how he’s doing and tell him how I feel. I don’t know if he’ll take the call, but it’s something I want to do.”
1:15 pm, NVMC - A few quick notes after a 75-minute practice at the NVMC before the Islanders bus departs for Phillies-mad Philadelphia…
Scott Gordon on his reasons for the line-tinkering (see post below): “I thought maybe it was time to change things. I thought a bigger body (Okposo in for Tambellini) might be good for Frans and Trent. More grit (Sim in for Park) might suit Mike Comrie’s line (with Hilbert).
“I didn’t want to jump the gun on the lines. I’ve given it a chance. Now I’m getting another look.”
- On one line rush, enforcer Mitch Fritz scored two goals. So when Gordon called out the start of power play practice, Fritz hopped over the boards. “One can only hope,” said Fritz. We’ll stick with our prediction that Fritz has a fight with Cote makes his Islanders debut tomorrow night in Philadelphia.
- Andy Sutton makes his season debut tomorrow, possibly with Bruno Gervais at his side. Working off a custom-built program by strength coach Chris Schwarz to increase mobility and flexibility, Sutton came to training camp 15 pounds lighter and determined to be a top-4 dman on the Islanders. Then, proving that strength coaches and trainers can only prevent so much, the 6-6 Sutton suffered damage to his hand in an exhibition game.
- While discussing Joey MacDonald’s solid play, Gordon offered this tidbit from his goaltending manual: “You can always tell when a goaltender is doing the right things – when he’s not always ending up on his butt.”
- Congratulations to our dear friends Linda and Islanders Events & Ops VP Tim Beach on the birth this morning of a baby girl, Annemarie. Mom and daughter are doing great. Daddy’s days of road trips to see The Who are officially over, whether he accepts that reality or not.
11:25 am, NVMC - Enforcer Mitch Fritz is on the ice with the Islanders at practice this morning at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
The 6-8 Fritz is wearing a yellow practice jersey, along with hip surgery-recovering Mike Sillinger. Scott Gordon also has the following trios:
Hilbert – Thompson – Park
Hunter – Nielsen – Okposo
Tambellini – Comrie – Sim
Bergenheim – Weight – Guerin
What it all means right now, would be silly to guess. Okay, we will. Fritz will play Thursday night in Philadelphia, and one of the 8 wings will take in a game from the press box.
Now if the Phillies-Rays are postponed again tonight, any chance the NHL and Flyers move the puck-drop time – or move the game altogether? Just a thought.
I promised some Point Blank readers an explanation from GM Garth Snow of why the Islanders don’t employ a heavyweight on the fourth line. Snow has put me and my subject on hold for a day, prompting pure, unadulterated speculation that perhaps Mitch Fritz could get the call for the game in fight-lovin’ Philadelphia tomorrow.
While I wait for the GM, I asked Point Blank pal Mike Fornabaio of the Connecticut Post – easily one of the ten-best beat writers in all of pro hockey, NHL or AHL – for a first-hand update on Fritz and enforcer prospect Joel Rechlicz. All Islanders followers should bookmark Mike’s Sound Tigers blog because he often scoops everyone. Here’s Mike’s email:
“If you’re wondering how Fritz is throwin’ ‘em… He’s not. Or, rather, he hasn’t.
“In five games, Fritz has played a solid little fourth-line game. He has moved the puck in and out. He has been physical when appropriate. He’s a minus-1, and that minus came after they got stuck on a long shift on an icing and Portland scored on a broken play.
“He hasn’t fought. Can he do it? Sure, but he hasn’t had to, either, though he hasn’t played a ton in this special-teams world.
“As for Rechlicz, he’s down with Utah of the East Coast Hockey League. Preseason showed him as a good-enough fighter who, especially based on the strength of the rest of the roster (I mean, there were 17 forwards on the ice here yesterday), needed work on his game.
“I wouldn’t write him off; his skating did look improved from what I remembered from last season (very small sample that it was), and, well, Eric Godard didn’t look like he could skate in 2001, either. But Rechlicz needs the work the Grizzlies can give him.
“Bridgeport has seven fighting majors in eight games. Five of those came, ironically, during the weekend Fritz spent with the Islanders on the two-game Florida trip. Tim Jackman has four of fighting majors, Jason Pitton has two, and Blake Comeau has the other, in his first game back.”
8:15 pm - In my game recap last night, I wrote the following:
After the game Scott Gordon gave a review of his team’s performance that was not as light as the one you’ll see below from this blogger. The first-year Islanders coach – perhaps accepting that he’ll be without several key players for a while – kept the bar high. His attitude was a welcomed change-up.
“I’m concerned about why the game changed for us,” said Gordon. “I thought we played extremely well for 30 minutes, and then it got away from us.” He brought up how his team “started taking the kind of penalties Carolina did against us in the second half in that game.”
Despite a trio of “bright-side” questions from other reporters, Gordon declined to provide a happy recap and use the injuries to four top defensemen as an excuse. “We’re trying to move in a direction not just this year, but down the road,” he said. “We want to change some habits.”
After the formal portion of his somewhat surprising post-game press conference, I continued the conversation one-one-one with Gordon. I will share those notes and my view of our talk in the practice coverage tomorrow.
Now it’s the day after and – I say this well aware the Islanders are 2-6 – I remain impressed.
Maybe it’s because I stood to the side of Islanders coaches for more than a decade after too many losses like last night. Maybe it’s because I was conditioned to hear lines like “You play with what you got,” “Give the other team credit,” and “We’re a shorthanded team right now.”
You know life is different when an Islanders head coach walks into a post-loss press conference room filled with reporters sympathetic to an under-manned team that just played hard, and the coach doesn’t accept the soft tosses.
That’s why I pulled Gordon aside for “a minute” that turned into ten minutes. To be frank, I wanted to monitor if this was a coach trying to send a message to his team through the media or if he really was so frustrated by the second half of the game. It was the latter.
When I asked if the breakdowns in the final 30 minutes were simply a matter of a team wearing down without Witt, Martinek, Sutton and Meyer, Gordon said he could use that as an excuse but, “the fact is, our problem wasn’t our defensemen.”
For ten additional minutes after his ten behind the podium, Gordon didn’t break down. Everyone can pick the Islanders for 14th or 15th or say his team is really done like dinner with the injuries to the D and DiPietro. Gordon’s not listening.
“It’s the simple things like turnovers and not showing enough patience,” he said. “Identifying that now’s the time to go, or when the time isn’t right. Just because we’re missing personnel, we’re not going to take a step back while we wait for guys to get healthy.”
My sense last night was that Gordon was growing a bit frustrated with one or two players making the same errors after seven weeks. The coach refused to go there, saying, “It’s all about what we’re doing as a team” and pounding home that “these problems are correctable.”
Gordon knows there’s nothing he can say to ease the pain of fans seeing 2-6 in today’s standings. He’s trying to control what he can control.
Leaving the Coliseum last night, I saw an old Islanders colleague on the business side. For him at 10:45 pm it was black-and-white: 2-6 record, 4-2 loss at home to the hated Rangers. “I’m off to drown my sorrows,” he said. “Ya got anything to make me feel better”?
“Yeah,” I told him. “I think you got the right coach.”
If you’d like to talk about it, I’ll be on and off the laptop for the next few hours. Do it in Comments, but I beg of you – no rants, no ALL CAPS, easy on the Fritz (who knows – maybe he shows up soon), no concern for how me picking the Islanders to lose a few games is career suicide, and “Pride n Passion”: let’s keep it under 47 paragraphs. Thanks, everyone. In just four weeks, the hit stats on this blog are off-the-charts, and I owe it all to you…CB
4:20 pm - Defenseman Jack Hillen has been sent to Bridgeport, where the prospect will get major minutes in the American Hockey League.
Hillen’s development will proceed the right way, now that Andy Sutton appears set to make his season debut when the Islanders play in Philadelphia on Thursday night. In six games, Hillen was pointless, minus-3, had 5 shots on goal and averaged 15 minutes playing time.
The 22-year old defenseman will be a good case study in the Islanders’ development program. He received a two-game NHL audition last season at the end of his collegiate career in Colorado. He made the Islanders this season partly with his impressive performances in exhibition games, but also out of necessity because of the injuries on the blueline. Hillen is a legitimate prospect with good puck-moving skills and a great head on his shoulders.
Point Blank speculated about this move last week before the latest injury outbreak. Now Hillen – through no fault of his own – is where he really belongs, playing 25 minutes a game for Jack Capuano.
← Older postsNewer posts →
