The Renaissance of the New York Islanders
The New York Islanders are a hockey team that has been in the bottom five of the standings of the National Hockey League (NHL) for the last 5 years. In 2006 the Islanders hired their former goalie Garth Snow as their General Manager. They were ridiculed for this move but since day one Snow has made a plethora of great personnel decisions. He has drafted incredibly. One of the star players that he drafted was John Tavares who is now one of the top players in the league. Some of the other moves he has made are called waiver pickups and trades. The last thing that has made him very successful is the fan base that has supported this rebuild from the beginning. There were a few hiccups but he has stuck to his guns. He said that there was going to be a rebuild and slowly but surely they have rebuilt this team from the ground up. Due to this rebuild the Islanders are on their way back to prominence, to winning the NHL championship, the Stanley Cup. In the early 2000’s the Islanders were run by a General Manager named Mike Millbury, nicknamed “Mad Mike” by all the fans. What he did to the franchise was run it into the ground by trading away all the young players for older players for a chance to win a Stanley Cup that year. All the fans knew that it was impossible with all the players that they had. They were either too old, past their prime or were rated too high on Mike Millbury’s scale. On his scale he would take a young promising player and trade him for a veteran player. Sometimes in sports it works but in hockey it doesn’t work. In hockey you have to build from young talent because players don’t last very long. Mike Millbury didn’t understand that and even as a TV analyst now for NBC he still doesn’t understand this concept. When he resigned in 2005 Islander fans were very happy. Their happiness was short lived as they hired someone who no one thought was in contention Garth Snow. Fans at the beginning were furious, but from the first moment he made great deals. In his first year he made a big trade to try to get the Islanders to win the Stanley Cup, but they lost in the first round of the playoffs. After that season he announced that the Islanders would be going on a slow rebuild starting with that year’s draft. In that draft they drafted 2 players who are main stays on the team now. Their names are Kyle Okposo and Andrew Macdonald. In the years that they were drafted, the analysts said Snow was crazy. It turns out that they were wrong. In 2008 he drafted 5 players that are now on the roster some of whom were not expected to be drafted where they were taken. There are also 2 or 3 more players that are still coming up through the farm system. In 2009 Snow had the easiest pick of his career because the Islanders were the worst team in the NHL and therefore they had the first overall pick. They took the consensus best player in the draft John Tavares. A few of the other players that he took that no one would have thought of were Josh Bailey, Travis Hamonic, Nino Niederreiter and Ryan Strome all of whom are or will be mainstays on this team for years to come. This is one of the reasons why Snow is the right man to be drafting for the Islanders and to help build up their team again. Another way of proving that Snow is going to be the one to bring the Islanders back to prominence are the waiver pickups that he has made. He has made four major waiver pickups of players that have made a major impact on the team. The four players are three time thirty goal scorer Matt Moulson, a player who has fifty assists Pierre Alexander Parenteau (PA), star offenseman Michael Grabner, and Goaltender Evgeni Nabokov. Nabokov was picked up last year by the islanders and as a “diss” to them he decided that he would not play. He was suspended for this, but this year he wanted to play hockey so he had to play for the Islanders. In a dramatic turn of events he just signed a one year contract extension.
