Sports

Trip to Wrong Island

BOSTON — Long Island is neither Brooklyn’s to promise nor a particularly good idea, if you want to know the truth about the Bruce Ratner/Brett Yormark plan to schedule six Islanders games a season at a remodeled, downsized Coliseum once the club makes the move to Barclays.

The concept is being sold as a romance novel, yet, as is typical in these sorts of things, the plan isn’t really novel at all. It is about real estate.

The Rangers/MSG already have approved the Islanders’ move to Brooklyn, as was required under the NHL constitution. There is no reason at all to believe they would green-light this hopscotch back to the Island for a half-dozen games, with their approval again required by the league.

Unless Ratner is going to pledge to ante up the difference in revenue between a full house in Brooklyn and one in a downsized Coliseum, it stretches credulity to believe the NHL and NHLPA would allow six games to be played in an arena with a capacity of 13,000.

Stripped of reality, the idea to bring the Islanders back to their roots about once a month can pull at the heartstrings. But really, do the fans on the Island — who are losing their franchise through no fault of their own — need to be reminded so up close and personally of what was once theirs a half-dozen times a year?

Would promote kind of a melancholia, wouldn’t it?

The pending move to Brooklyn serves the franchise’s fan base far better than a move to Quebec or Seattle. We all know that. But there’s nothing noble in splitting a schedule any more than in splitting a baby.

Here’s one that Angels owner Arte Moreno never thought of: the Brooklyn Islanders of Long Island.

* Alex Ovechkin, Adam Oates and the conspiracy theorists in D.C. fit nicely into what has become the Capitals’ Culture of Losing.

It has become pervasive, infecting a franchise that always somehow finds something or someone to blame for its failings.

Could the Caps have been awarded a power play or two in Game 6? Of course. Should Mike Green have been given a 5-minute major and game misconduct for using his stick to smack Derek Dorsett across the mouth? Without a doubt.

Oh, did you hear that Ovechkin had a fractured bone in his foot when he ran 40 feet to smash Ryan McDonagh in the first period of Game 7?

They are perennial disappointments in D.C., where the locker room apparently was built without mirrors.

* File this one away for the July 5 opening of the free agent market: If there’s one guy on that Capitals club the Rangers have come to respect over the course of their annual playoff confrontations, that would be Matt Hendricks, the jagged-edged center who kills penalties and fits the Black-and-Blueshirt mold.

Hendricks, who turns 32 next month, will be coming off a contract under which he earned $825,000 per. Expect the Rangers to put in a call when the market opens.

* New rule: When a penalty is assessed at the 20:00 mark of a period, the next period shall begin with the faceoff in the offensive zone of the club on the power play and not at the center dot.

New rule: When a player intentionally is thrown out of the faceoff circle following an icing in order to give his team a few extra seconds of rest — as was the case twice with the Bruins’ Milan Lucic in Game 1 against the Rangers — a delay of game minor shall be called.

* Boy, oh boy, is there an abundance of misplaced pity on behalf of Raffi Torres, the serial predator now employed by the Sharks serving a suspension of up to six games for his — what else? — headshot that took out the Kings Jarret Stoll in Game 1 of the Western semis.

And in arguing on behalf of his player, Sharks general manager Doug Wilson comes off as just another in a long line of NHL enablers whose failure to condemn recidivists such as Torres and Patrick Kaleta contribute to the danger these players pose to those around them every time they take the ice.

Wilson’s statement arguing against the suspension failed to address the only pertinent issue of the case: If Torres didn’t deliver the check with intent to injure, then why on earth did he raise up and explode at Stoll’s head when the Kings’ center’s body was vulnerable and fair game?

Torres apparently can’t stop himself. That’s no excuse for Wilson’s failure to stop being part of the group of enablers, who just can’t see right from wrong when it comes to a player under their employ.

larry.brooks@nypost.com