FanPost

Rescuing The Rebuild

The Islanders are in the midst of a dismal season. Yes, it is still early in the season, but this fact makes the season seem rather more than less dismal, since many months stretch ahead with no apparent hope for improvement; the team’s fate is already sealed, any optimism for happier results seems foolish, and the only realistic or justified outlook for the rest of the season is to write it off and look forward to next year, which outlook is discouraged by the lack of any evidence that next year will be any better. The fact that 9 years into a rebuild, which can be dated back to the drafting of John Tavares, the team appears to be no closer to success, with little more to show for the long term presence of one of the league’s premier players than a feeble first round playoff victory and a frustrating near-miss for the league scoring championship for JT, adds to the gloom emanating from Brooklyn. And adding one more layer of gloom to the situation is the threat that the team’s lone bright spot, JT himself, may be on his way out the door if things don’t improve, which will leave the team back where it started almost a decade ago, only with perpetually frustrated fans now almost 10 years older and 10 year closer to their graves, with no satisfying reward for their loyalty. No wonder there are so few smiling faces today in Islanderland.

Yet, I don’t think the cause is totally lost. It will take some desperate measures to save this rebuild, but I believe it can be saved if the proper steps are taken. But I also believe they must be taken right now, without further delay, that the steps are very chancy and will take a lot of guts, and that they are as likely to end in disaster as success, depending on who is making the decisions. Still, it is better to make the hard decisions and trust to those decisions, than to continue to drift in the miserable limbo in which the team currently finds itself.

According to all reports, the Islanders still have a good pool of young prospects in their system. I’m a bit on the skeptical side when it comes to Islander prospects, having heard many boosted as can't-miss during recent decades, only to see meager results from them at the NHL level; still, there always seemed to be more to the encouraging evaluations of the Islander future than team PR-spin or fan happy talk and wishfulness. Their prospect pool has been praised in print and on the internet by presumably impartial judges, has consistently been rated close to the top of NHL Team Prospect lists for the last five years. So there must be something there.

What we need to do is search the tattered pages of history for a rebuild that got off to a similarly encouraging start, then seemed to fizzle, then was rescued at the last minute by astute management hires, bold and desperate moves by that team’s new management, with resulting success at the end of the day. The example that most closely parallels that of the current Islanders is that of the hated Pittsburgh Penguins of the late 80’s and early 90’s

Chapter One: Tank Town

To call the history of the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team up to the 1983-84 mediocre would be an act of generosity. Of the six 1967 expansion teams, their performance, on & off the ice, was better only than the pathetic Oakland/California/Cleveland Seals/Golden Seals/Barons, who had, by 1980, disappeared from the league. In an era when it was harder to miss than make the playoffs, the Pens earned a post-season berth in about half their seasons. They had been on the verge of bankruptcy most of their history, drew poor crowds, and were one of those teams you’d ask, when watching them "Why does this franchise even exist". The most outstanding accomplishment in their early history had been blowing a 3-0 playoff series lead to the Islanders in the 1975 playoffs, and their high point had also been a playoff loss, when they almost upset the dynasty Islanders in 1982.

It was two years after this high point when they plunged into their deepest abyss: the 1983-84 season. Yet, that was an abyss with a purpose. The Penguins engineered the most obvious, and most successful, tank job in the history of North American Major League team sports.

Available in the draft at the end of that season, was the one human being capable of saving the Pittsburgh NHL franchise from extinction: Mario Lemieux. Lemieux was the most highly touted player to enter the NHL draft since Guy Lafleur. He was, by all reports, better than Lafleur—which was saying a lot. Wayne Gretzky dominated the league at that time (Gretzky had never been draft eligible), and reports said that Lemieux was as good as Gretzky, only bigger, faster, stronger. Gretzky’s seemingly untouchable records could one day be threatened by only one mortal—Mario Lemieux. And the Pens had to have him.

The problem was that as bad as the Pens were, that year there was an even worse team in the NHL: the New Jersey Devils. On the 23rd of November, 1993, the Devils played in Pittsburgh in their twentieth game of the season. In their previous game, they had lost 13-4 to Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers, inspiring Gretzky’s infamous comments about their being a "Mickey Mouse" organization. The Devils also lost that game to Pittsburgh and the one after that to Boston to fall to a record of 2-20-0 after 22 games. The Penguins, at the same mark, had a record of 6-13-3; pretty bad, but not bad enough to get hold of Lemieux. The Devils were historically bad; the Penguins were just another in a long line of ordinarily bad teams.

Then the Pens went into tank mode, which episode is well recorded in history and needs not to be repeated here, and a spectacular turtle race ensued for the rest of the season, to see who got Lemieux and who got booby prize Kirk Muller, the Penguins copping the race by going 10-45-3 over the last 58 games while the Devils finished up with a run of 15-36-7. With 38 points vs. the Devils’ 41, the Penguins won the Mario Lemieux Derby, and saved the franchise. At that point, the rebuild began

Chapter Two: Continuing Struggles

Even with Lemieux, the Pens weren’t a very good team. It took them five years with Lemieux to finally make the playoffs (one more year than it took the Tavares Islanders), but in that time, they were stockpiling hot young prospects, selecting those prospects with high first round picks earned by their poor on-ice performance. In Lemieux’s draft year, they also picked Doug Bodger with the 9th overall selection. The next year, they took Craig Simpson, 2nd overall; the year after it was Zarley Zalapski, 4th overall, the year after, Chris Joseph 5th overall, and the year after that, Darrin Shannon, also 5th overall. The most interesting thing about all these very high, much heralded, picks, was that, besides Lemieux, none of them was with the team when they finally won the championship.

Chapter Three: Knowing When To Hold, Knowing When To Fold

Though none of these players was with the team when they won the cup, each was instrumental in helping the team win—by getting traded. On November 24, 1987, Eddie Johnston, who was the GM at the start of the rebuild, dealt Simpson & Joseph in a package to acquire Paul Coffey from Edmonton. Over that summer, Johnston left the Pens for Hartford (he comes back into the story later) and an ex-goalie with zero high level NHL management experience, Tony Esposito, was hired as the team’s new GM. Tony O did an overall shitty job as Pens GM, except for two things: on November 12, 1988, he traded Bodger & Shannon to Buffalo for Tom Barrasso, giving the Pens a Cup-quality goaltender, and in 1990, his Pens made the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time in the Lemieux era, and even won a playoff series for the first time in a decade, sweeping the Rangers 4-0, before losing to Philly in a spectacularly entertaining seven game second round matchup. With Lemieux, Coffey, Barasso, Zalapski, hot shot youngsters Rob Brown, John Cullen, Mark Recchi, Kevin Stevens, Phil Bourque, it looked like the Penguins & Lemieux were finally on the road to glory.

Chapter Four: Regression & Rescue

Here’s where it gets interesting and instructive for Islander fans. After five years of continued improvement, the Pens cratered in 1990. Lemieux, suffering for the first time from the back injuries that would plague his career, would miss 21 games. On December 5th, with a record of 10-14-2, good for fifth in the Patrick Division, (ahead of only the NY Islanders), the Pens fired their GM/Coach combination of Esposito & Gene Ubriaco, hiring Craig Patrick to take over both positions. Patrick made it clear that he would be coaching only for the rest of the season, to evaluate the talent that had been collected during the 7 years of rebuilding since the tank job of 1983. The Pens didn’t improve much the rest of the year, missed the playoffs for the 6th time in the 7 year Lemieux era, and the rebuild looked on the verge of collapsing.

Chapter Five: Professionals In Charge

The difference was that now the Pens had professionals in charge, professionals with a history of success at different levels of hockey, pro and amateur. Patrick had been instrumental in creating the 1980 US Olympic gold medal winning team, and had also done good work in his brief time with the New York Rangers, building a team that had some surprising playoff success in the 80’s before his rebuild was aborted by a typically unwise Ranger firing. Patrick ended his own tenure as Penguins coach, not by hiring a minor league flunky on the cheap, but by bringing in Bob Johnson, who had won championships at the NCAA level and had also taken the Calgary Flames to their first Stanley Cup Finals appearance in 1986. He had been a very highly regarded and respected coach for years.

That year, in the NHL draft, Patrick selected Jaromir Jagr with the fifth overall pick. He acquired Joey Mullen and Gord Roberts for draft picks. In trades, he picked up Larry Murphy, Scott Young, Ron Francis and Ulf Samuelsson for Rob Brown, Jim Johnson, Chris Dahlqvist, John Cullen and Zarley Zalapski. Some of these moves seem obvious in hindsight, but the Jagr selection was considered a gamble because there were still complications with Eastern European players, the Iron Curtain having just fallen; the Ron Francis trade is considered a swindle, but it was a gutsy move at the time—Cullen was 26 years old, younger than Francis, coming off a 110 point season and was again in the top 10 in league scoring; Zalapski was 21 years old, already an all-star and considered perhaps the brightest young defenseman in the league. The next year, in another gutsy move, Patrick traded 22 year old 100 point man Mark Recchi to division rival Philadelphia (for Rick Tocchet & Kjell Samuelsson) to bolster another Stanley Cup Champion team. Perhaps even more impressive, the Pens lost their hall-of-fame coach Bob Johnson over that summer in tragic circumstances, and replaced him with another hall-of-famer in Scotty Bowman. They didn’t do their coaching on the cheap. The Penguins had the peculiar notion that a team with high profile, talented players merited a respected, high-profile coach with a record of success. They held the radical, revolutionary idea that the coach of a team should be as good at his job as the players are at theirs.

Parallels

There are a number of parallels between the current Islanders and the Penguins as the Pens were in the midst of their disappointing 1990 season. We look at the Islanders now with their long standing combination of Snow & Capuano. The season is slipping, has slipped, away, and is sure to end in dismal failure, yet we read "You can’t fire the GM in mid-season. We just have to wait for the season to play out, then we can bring in the right guy to run things." Yet the Penguins did fire their GM & their coach, and showed the value of doing this, because it gave their new boss time to get acquainted with the team personnel, the players, and how things were run in the organization. With this experience, the new GM possessed the knowledge necessary to formulate a plan to take the rebuild to the next step. These moves bore fruit the very next season in a Stanley Cup championship. Such results are undoubtedly too much to expect from the current Islanders, but this realization doesn’t mean an immediate replacement of the coach & GM shouldn’t be considered.

The Pens had certain things on their side the Islanders don’t have. First, they had Mario Lemieux. We all love JT and hate Mario, but even the most biased Islander fan wouldn’t favorably compare Tavares with Lemieux. Second, they had Jagr available in the draft. We don’t know much about the prospects for next year’s draft, but likely there won’t be a Jagr available at number 5. He had Cullen and Zalapski, Cullen, who had already proven himself as an NHL scorer, and Zalapski, a elite prospect whose trade value had not been ruined by Islander-style jerking around. He had Tom Barasso and Paul Coffey from trades made by previous managers, and second line talent (Stevens, Recchi, Brown, Young, Errey) to either step up during Lemieux’s many absences, or to be traded to patch holes in the team’s structure. The Islanders, meanwhile, have a still young team with prospects we’ve heard a lot about, but of whom (and from whom) we’ve seen very little. They may be good, they may be ordinary. Who knows? Only in the backwaters of Connecticut and the wild reaches of British Columbia do hockey fans ever actually get to see Islander prospects.

There are several lessons to be learned from studying the Penguins of 1984-1991 that could help is rescuing the Islanders’ rebuild, to wit:

Lesson #1: the person starting the rebuild doesn't necessarily have to be the one who finishes it.

Lesson #2: even lousy GMs (Johnston & Esposito) make good deals (Coffey & Barrasso) once in a while. Those deals shouldn't earn them lifetime tenure if their other moves don't work out.

Lesson #3: One superstar does not a championship team make. It's who you add to that superstar that makes a championship team. When possessing an elite talent like Lemieux or JT, it is helpful to the elite talent to find elite or near elite talent to play with him. The Penguins did this with Francis, Recchi, Mullen, Stevens. The Islanders system seems to be throw shit at a fan and hope it turns into gold before it comes back and hits you in the face.

Lesson #4: Progressing from the dreg stage to respectability is easy. Going up further from there is the hard part. Those responsible for the first stage are rarely still around at the end. Here’s an analogy from motor racing: it’s easy to pass backmarkers because they're not very good. That’s why they’re backmarkers. When you start getting to the front of the field, you're facing better competition and each one is harder to pass. You'll see a car move up from 30th to 5th in 10-15 laps, then take 30 laps to go from 5th to 4th. The Islanders going from 30th to 12-15th in the league was easy. They stalled at that point and have since fallen to the back of the pack. Is it unreasonable to think that they might do better if they put someone new in the driver’s seat? Isn’t it at least worth trying?

Lesson #5: High draft picks are useful not only in drafting good players, but also in acquiring players who may not turn out to be as good as expected, but who have value because they were selected high, and it’s a good move, if you find out you overrated a player in drafting him, to maintain his trade value by sheltering and protecting that value, rather than running it down. The Pens did well in this, trading away players they picked high but who they discovered had limited ceilings (Joseph, Shannon, Zalapski, Bodger) before the rest of the league found out. Garth did this with Reinhart, but otherwise the Islanders have been criminally negligent in ruining the reputations and value of their young players (Nino & Strome being the obvious examples). Thus, when the Penguins traded Chris Joseph, they got back Paul Coffey. When they traded Darrin Shannon they got back Tom Barrasso. When the Islanders traded Nino Niederreiter, they got back Cal Clutterbuck. When they trade Strome, they’ll be lucky to get back a 3rd round pick.

Lesson #6: It takes courage to progress from respectability to championship status. Once you acquire a Lemieux or Tavares in the draft, your team improves. You should soon be too good a team to expect immediate help from drafted players. Sometimes you have to make trades, and often in those trades you have to make sacrifices and take chances. They could blow up and end in disaster. It took guts for Craig Patrick to trade a Zarley Zalapski. We know now that it was a good deal, but at the time it was very chancy. Same with dealing a Cullen or Recchi. Snow did make an attempt on the Vanek deal. But there is a difference between gutsy and stupid.

Conclusion: to continue to grow, the Islanders need to get rid of their current leadership and replace them with seasoned professionals who have actual experience with high level success. Every day Snow & Capuano continue with this team further ruins the team’s chances of future success. Capuano should be gone before this team plays another game. In his time, when he was hired, he was OK, but he’s been here far too long with too little to show for it to justify his continued tenure with the club. He is the type of coach you bring in when you admit your team has no chance to succeed (like a first year expansion team) knowing he’ll be gone by the time the team gets good. Snow has also outlived his usefulness, especially, considering his uncommunicative, secretive, paranoid management style, with a team in a new arena trying to gain new fans. He has made some good moves and some bad ones, but the team has reached a plateau with him and he is clearly incapable of advancing them further. The Islanders should thank Snow & Capuano for their hard work in the past, give them gold watches and lifetime passes as "valued Islander alumni" and show them the door. Tomorrow, if not sooner. Bring in a seasoned, veteran GM, even as an interim caretaker, for the rest of the year, to evaluate the organization from top to bottom, and to make recommendations going into next season. Because if they don’t do this now, or very soon, they’ll be doing it next year and next year will be a wasted season too, and the result may be their losing the one genuine star player they have.



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