The Guys Never Quit!

Can't say the same for myself. I've been battling the flu all week so when the Isles were down 2-0, I went to sleep. When I woke up and saw that our boys pulled it out in the shootout, well, that made me feel better. Big ups to my dad who I told to check in on the Isles last night for some family rooting interest as I didn't think I'd be awake for any of the game.

Interesting to read the differing accounts of the game last night. I check the Toronto papers every day for some general NHL news and they seem to have the same twisted relationship as the Red Sox do with the Boston papers. None of the news is ever super-positive for the home team--forty years between Cups'll do that, eh, boys?--but they sure do like to take the piss out of the opponents. Yesterday the Toronto media had a field day making snarky comments about Garth Snow; the summer the Islanders had; Charles Wang, etc. The made fun of the rink and of DiPietro's contract. Everything is so great in Leafs Nation that they can rip on the other teams in the league. of course, no one bothered to mention that with all of the benefits of being in Toronto, the Leafs were in the same dog fight that the Islanders are in for the playoffs.

Today, the Leafs are whining about Mats Sundin's disallowed goal. It comes off as so "poor me". Bryan McCabe--former Islander--decries the shootout as a "crapshoot" and tries to get the Leafs focused on their next big game on Saturday. I guess when your team is 3-6 in shootouts, the whole exercise gets easy to dismiss. Still, those are 6 points the Leafs have given away. Why did nobody point that out?

Let's face this, too: if the NHL league office and officials are going to "favor" any teams in the NHL, it's going to be the Toronto Maple Leafs and the New York Rangers. The Islanders have spent this season busting their backsides and competing shift after shift to gain some respect around the league. If referee Kerry Fraser decides that Alexei Ponikarovsky has made "incidental interference" with goalie Rick DiPietro, it had to be serious contact for him to disallow a goal. Of course, I have not yet seen the contact. I've only read the papers.

I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on Monday's matinee with the Penguins...but I don't know what more there is to say about the best game of the season other than a tape of the game was instantly made a DVD for the summer when I get the shakes and I need some hockey. Sillinger's goal with less than 30 seconds was one of the most exciting plays we've had as Islander fans since...since...yep, I am going to say it...Shawn Bates' penalty shot vs. the Leafs in the playoffs a few years ago.

A lot of focus is being shifted to player movement with the trade deadline coming up so fast. I don't know about you, but I like the fact that the deadline has been pushed into February from mid-March. Granted, it did give us hockey fans a reason to hit reload over and over on the TSN.ca webpage when most people were into the NCAA tournaments, but it did come a few weeks too late into the season. Some of the traded guys would get less than like ten games with their new teams before they went to war with them for two months time. It just seemed like too short of a period to get assimilated into the team structure; especially when you'd have to learn new systems and stuff. Plus, the end result of the late-season trade deadline was the Rent-A-Player phenomenon--and that backfired a heck of a lot more than it worked.

With the Islanders, that means the spotlight is on Jason Blake. Blake, who made the comments in Newsday a few weeks ago that he hoped for a deal by the trade deadline, is going to be the kind of player that other contending teams are going to want--and they are going to want him for the exact same reasons that we need to keep him on the Island. The guy busts his backside and gives every ounce of energy that he has on every shift. Has he missed playing with Yashin? He sure has. The two of them were magical; each able to play to the strengths of the other. Yash wants to slow the game down and Jason wants to push push push the pace. Blake needs the puck to be at his best and Yashin needs to be able to get time to set up on the half-boards to play the game he plays. Blake does some of the dirty work and that really seemed to rub off on Alexei. Getting the captain back will really be like adding a player at the deadline.

Saying that, I hope for team chemistry that something can be ironed out with Blakey soon. Everybody hates a pest unless he is your pest. Blake is our pest and we know that the brain trust of the team sees him as a very important piece of the pie.