The first reaction is entirely understandable, the shrieking horror when it was revealed on Wednesday afternoon that the return Islanders general manager Garth Snow was getting for the league’s prime trade asset was entirely underwhelming.
By sending Thomas Vanek and a conditional fifth-round pick to the Canadiens in exchange some 20-year-old Swedish prospect named Sebastian Collberg and a conditional second-round pick, Snow became raw meat in the middle of a circle of rabid and foaming critics.
On television, they called the trade a “fireable offense,” and one award-winning Canadian writer so eloquently declared the whole Islanders organization “a tire fire.” Fans reached out en masse to sports-talk radio, to newspaper websites, to media email inboxes and to all corners of the Internet to decree their hatred. One fan sent a note saying he was going to burn all of his Islanders merchandise in his backyard this Saturday — and videotape it for the world to see.
Now, with some deep breaths, relax.
Maybe all of that immediate bile is entirely justified. One Swedish reporter in the Garden press box Wednesday night said Collberg had a hard time making the roster of Frolunda in the Swedish league, and his three goals and nine points in 40 games this season surely makes that assessment seem reasonable. Yet Snow’s first reaction was to cite Collberg’s performance for his country in the 2014 World Junior Championships, when he had one goal and five assists in seven games while capturing the silver medal.
“Good speed, good hands,” Snow said with all sincerity. “He has a chance to be a top-six forward in this league.”
When the Canadiens make the playoffs – they’re currently in second place in the conference – the Islanders will get that second-round pick, and cede a fifth-rounder back to Montreal.
And in the end, whether Collberg pans out or not, this is the best Snow could do. He took a risk on Vanek, and now is hardly worse off for it. To recap:
– He sent Matt Moulson, along with first- and second-round picks to Buffalo to acquire Vanek in late October. Moulson would have been out the door for nothing this summer as a free agent, and Snow already recouped that second-round pick.
– That leaves the first-round pick, which will be deferred to 2015 so as not to lose what is shaping up to be another top-five pick in this year’s draft. And that pick in 2015 could be considered saved in part by what Snow got in exchange for defenseman Andrew MacDonald, who was traded to the Flyers for second- and third-round picks, along with a possible future penalty-killer from Long Island named Matt Mangene – all in addition to Collberg. With the contract demands of MacDonald, he would have been out the door as fast as Vanek or Moulson, so this is again something instead of nothing.
Of course, this is the Islanders, so there must be some major conspiracy that centers around their finances, no? Could they have just upped their offer to Vanek – or to Moulson before that – and could they have done the same to retain MacDonald? Sure, and then the team with one of the weakest revenue streams in the league would be weighed down with bad contracts, unable to move them and in a perpetual cycle of failure.
Which would be nothing new to them. This is a franchise that hasn’t won a playoff series since 1993 – if you were born that year, you can now legally drink – and who miraculously made the playoffs in last year’s lockout-shortened campaign for the first time since 2007.
And that past failure was the result of mismanagement, of making bad and shortsighted trades and signings that derailed a once-proud organization. And not all of those decisions were made by Mike Milbury, either. (At the bottom or Rick DiPietro’s contract you will find Snow’s own signature.) How to steer it back onto the rails is not a task that is predictable or easy.
Yet that is the task now laid at Snow’s feet. He has been in charge since 2006, and just about everything in the organization has his fingerprint on it. If the Islanders want to move into Brooklyn’s Barclays Center after next season – and if owner Charles Wang hopes to find a buyer for his product, most hopefully the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, his soon-to-be fellow tenant – then things need to start working out. Not in some undefinable future, but next year, their last in that old barn on Hempstead Turnpike.
There surely are good players on the team and in the system, starting first and foremost with John Tavares and his basement-bargain price of $5.5 million for the next four seasons. Kyle Okposo has turned out into an actual top-six NHL forward, and rookies Ryan Strome and Anders Lee seem to be progressing with their short big league cameos, as has defenseman Calvin de Haan. Not far down the pike are blueliners Griffin Reinhart and Ryan Pulock.
Yet Snow is also the same man who put his faith into Josh Bailey’s development – at $3.3 million a year through 2017-18 – and who pays Michael Grabner $3 million a season (through 2015-16) to be a speedy enigma. There is certainly the chance Snow didn’t get a fair value for Vanek for no other reason than who he is, and what team he represents.
Or there is the chance that what he did get was fair value, and at this point most people are so clouded by previous bad decisions that they can’t see this might have been the only reasonable option available.
It was a risk Snow took in acquiring Vanek, and it’s a risk every time he makes a personnel decision. He now has a handful of picks for June’s draft and many roster holes to fill – none more important than finding an actual long-term solution in goal.
Maybe he made a mistake in trading Vanek for what he did. Maybe this was just the next step in Islanders futility.
But maybe it wasn’t, and then, well, what in the world would everyone have to scream about?