The Tampa Bay Lightning left Brooklyn last night and boarded a plane for Detroit, the next stop on their five game road trip. They will take the ice tonight with a 9-6-1 record on the 2016-17 season. Three of those wins, by a combined score of 14-2, have come against the New York Islanders, who seem to have zero answers the past two weeks to the malaise that has taken over this team.
Head coach Jack Capuano has juggled lines. He’s called out his players to the media. He’s, not ‘stick to the face’ directly, but more like ‘hook around the hands’ directly, called out his general manager. He’s showed some slight snark at reporters, then answered the same question the follow week with calmness and resignation. In his seventh year as bench boss, it seems the expiration date, for which I believe all coaches have, has come. But will general manager Garth Snow act on it?
The problems have been regurgitated on the pages of SNY the past several weeks and all across hockey media in the New York…show more content… Sure, there have been injuries to Ryan Pulock, Dennis Seidenberg and Travis Hamonic, a trade notice put out by Garth Snow on Jaroslav Halak and a captain who, on some nights, doesn’t differentiate himself enough from the passengers.
But those cannot, any longer, be used as excuses for sub-par results. This team is talented, make no mistake about it, but misguided and at the current time, mismanaged. Players are not allowed to develop any chemistry with each other being placed in a line blender multiple times a week. The system, whether you put that on the players not executing it or the design, has failed them repeatedly with a hideous breakout and neutral zone play. Its dump and grind, dump and grind, dump and grind. The Islanders have turned into the neutral zone trapping New Jersey Devils of the past, only without the wins and Stanley
