It would be one thing for Garth Snow to dial Peter Laviolette’s digits on his cell phone, quite another for the Islanders’ general manager to get the authorization from owner Charles Wang to take on the believed $2,000,000 in digits per year the former Flyers coach is owed on his contract with Philadelphia, in force through 2014-15.
Presuming, A) the Islanders have interest in replacing Jack Capuano to jump-start their dreadful season, and, B) the Flyers would grant Snow permission to speak to Laviolette; does anyone believe that A plus B equals an ownership commitment in C-notes of approximately $3.25 million for a head coach on Long Island?
The Islanders, like so many teams at different times, have been decimated by injuries. The long-term loss of Evgeni Nabokov, who is just good enough to keep a mediocre team in contention for a final playoff spot but not much more than that, has exposed the organization’s lack of NHL-ready depth in goal.
(Hmm, Kyle Okposo for Cam Talbot? Well, no, of course not. The Rangers couldn’t do that, either.)
And significant injuries to Lubomir Visnovsky and Brian Strait following Mark Streit’s offseason free agent defection have exposed the blue line as too thin and green.
(Hmm, Nino Niederreiter for Michael Del Zotto? Oh, no, sorry, the Islanders already gave away Niederreiter to Minnesota over the summer to close a chapter that eventually could register as one of Snow’s most grave blunders, didn’t they?)
Entering Saturday night’s match in L.A., the Islanders had lost eight straight (0-6-2) and had not won in regulation or overtime since Nov. 12. They had just five ROWs all season, more than only the hapless Sabres, with three.
They become demoralized too easily and appear to have adopted the approach that playing hard against the Penguins is the sum and substance of their collective job responsibility. This may not be Capuano’s fault, but the well-liked coach hasn’t been able to inspire or cajole a consistent work ethic out of his team that collectively seems to be finishing in eighth place in a 48-game season before winning two playoff games is an achievement of notice.
Wang, since firing Laviolette after two years behind the Islanders’ bench in 2003, has gone on the cheap in hiring a succession of coaches including Steve Stirling, Ted Nolan, Scott Gordon and Capuano.
Now, the owner is as likely to sell the team as he is to remain on the masthead when the Islanders relocate to Brooklyn for 2015-16. Would Laviolette and the financial commitment necessary to hire him make the team more or less attractive to a prospective buyer?
The budget has nothing to do with the cap. The budget, though, has traditionally had much to do with identity of the head coach.
Remember, beginning next season, the cap won’t be set at $8 million over the mid-point, but 15 percent above that number. Which is why the cap is projected to escalate to approximately $90 million within four years if NHL revenue increases annually by about 5 percent and the NHLPA concurrently triggers the annual 5-percent escalator.
The floor (15 percent below the midpoint) should reach more than $66.5 million under those conditions by 2017-18.
So the seventh and final year of Henrik Lundqvist’s contract extension? Figure a pro-rated payout on a 48-game lockout season in 2020-21.
Just a horrendous and all-too typically arrogance-based missed call from an NHL referee on Friday night in Newark with 1:08 to go in a one-goal game, when Frederick L’Ecuyer cited Cory Schneider for playing the puck outside the trapezoid when everybody else in the building could see the goaltender had done no such thing.
That’s a no-judgment call that should be subject to video review, as should be delay of game for shooting the puck into the stands inside the defensive zone and a double-minor for drawing blood.
These aren’t calls open to interpretation, such as goaltender interference. These are he-did-or-he-didn’t issues that could be resolved almost instantaneously and without intruding on the game’s flow. That’s assuming there is a flow, which is a leap of faith in many rinks.
Yes, it’s true, many general managers had no idea how the NHL playoff format would work prior to their league meeting a couple of weeks ago. When they learned the structure, many were aghast.
Expect the GMs to push for a change over the summer, but the format is part of the three-year realignment agreement the NHL has with the NHLPA, and it was the union that insisted on the wild-card/crossover as a means to achieve some sort of math-based equality between seven- and eight-team divisions.
“If that’s what the players wanted, there couldn’t have been any players involved in the decision,” one prominent player said this week.
The Sabres, averaging 1.59 goals per game entering Saturday’s match in Montreal, aren’t simply bad offensively, they are historically bad … as in the worst in the modern history of the NHL.
The 1952-53 Blackhawks (1.9 goals-per) were the last club to average less than two goals per game, but no team has scored a lower rate than these Sabres since 1928-29, when five clubs came in at 1.5 per or under, with Chicago setting the pace at 0.75 per by scoring 33 goals in the 44-game season.
That’s when 2.92 goals were scored per game in the NHL.
And it wasn’t even Jacques Lemaire’s fault.