Comments (0) So I wrote this post that pissed of a bunch of Penguins fans and they annoyed me. But this one is hands down the best response. First he tries to join Lighthouse Hockey under a troll name and gets banned immediately. So he decides to email me and mock me:
So with the Islanders getting closer and closer to a playoff birth, I thought it might be interesting to look around the web and see where the Isles were predicted to finish at the start of the season.
ESPN Season Starting Power Rank has them in 27th, behind Calgary and Edmonton.
SBN Season Preview the Atlantic Preview written by some hack had them in last.
CBS Sports Season Preview had the Islanders finishing dead last in the East
The Hockey News had them in dead last in the East
Puck Daddy Atlantic Preview had them in Last
NBC Pro Hockey Talk had some great quotes about the Isles:
2. Which team will finish last overall?
JB: New York Islanders. Glaring weaknesses in all areas.
MH: Columbus Blue Jackets. The Central Division is loaded; they’re going to get slaughtered.
RD: Columbus Blue Jackets. I hate being predictable, but I can’t think of anyone even remotely close to CBJ.
JY: New York Islanders. The rest of their division is a meat grinder and they’re ridiculously young.
JOB: Columbus Blue Jackets. On paper, it doesn’t get much worse.
Sports Illustrated Atlantic preview had them finishing last
And their first power rankings of the season had them in 28th
Looking back at this, the greatest irony for me is how many people mentioned Rick DiPietro’s injuries while ignoring that Nabokov is on the roster. Also they felt fine predicting a big season for the Flyers despite Bryz’s insanity.
First off, I’m a weird fellow. For some reason I save nearly all the pics and screengrabs I use on here. Today I happened to be looking for a pic, when I stumbled upon a screengrab from an old story about BD Gallof. The great thing about it was that it accidentally contained some tweets which I was too lazy to go digging around for. So let’s get to the article.
Following the announcement (and the leaks of the announcement) that the Islanders were moving to Brooklyn, BD Gallof took to his twitter to toot his own horn that he had called it all along. He tweeted people his old stories (which were only a few months old) and said that he had been calling Brooklyn all along. Let’s say though you happened to have a few screen shots of Gallof’s timeline following the failure of the August 1st Referendum which was the last ditch attempt to keep the team on the Island. What exactly would his timeline say then? Well let’s take a look:
Not sure which one here is better, the “Operate at cap floor and sell in 2015″ or that “The onus is no longer on Wang to keep the team local” (although you can debate whether or not Brooklyn is local, of course I consider it as such).
Nah, the winner in this one is “I think all talk of Queens, Brooklyn, Suffolk all fan manufactured…”. It has since come out that Wang had been talking with Ratner about the move to Brooklyn before the August referendum.
Let’s take a look at the next page of tweets:
The key one on this page of images is the retweet by Ty Anderson. In it Gallof specifically says that Brooklyn is out and that Wang will sell to the highest bidder. Good thing Gallof has those inside sources to give him the real deal.
If Gallof was dealing with any team other then the Islanders, he’d be laughed out. It’s amazing that someone who started with Eklund, another guy who gets it painfully wrong on a regular basis, is able to get away with all this. Gallof is at nearly at the same level as Incarcerated Bob, say the most common sense thing and if that fails, flail. When you can rack up nearly 5,000 tweets in a matter of months, it’s easy to bury when you’ve been wrong.
If your going to claim to have sources inside the organization and news that no one else can get, then occasionally get it right. The tweets I had saved were originally from another post I made in which Gallof claimed Tavares wouldn’t be signed long term due to the Isles losing the referendum. If your going to post your thoughts and opinions on the team, then go ahead and do it. But don’t make up sources, because you should get called on it.
(I started writing this over the summer and had been meaning to finish it. It’s not done, but given Today’s News, I transferred it here from LHH since it never would have been published.)
It’s easy to say that the leaders of the Town of Hempstead, specifically Kate Murray, have acted as though the Islanders are hostages to the towns whims. Even with the threat of the team moving, and plenty of areas across North America more then willing to embrace a hockey team, the idea seems foreign to these people. Even more, they just seem indifferent to what a professional sports team brings to an area. Let’s speak truthfully, if the Islanders do move, Long Island will never see another major sports team in the area.
With the lockout taking out the pre-season, and so far threatening to take out more of the season, maybe these politicians can finally wake up. I was under the impression that although the lockout was cancelling games, the Coliseum and surrounding area would still have other events. But I was informed on twitter by a few area bartenders that their best customers were Islander fans showing up before and after games. Also a look at the events currently scheduled at the Coliseum, there are 5 events between now and February. This is not going to help cover the gap for the lockout, this is the closest to a taste of the team moving Hempstead will get.
The Islanders were next to last in average attendance last season at 13,191. That comes to almost 550,000 people. Of course since attendance is calculated by tickets sold and not the actual at game attendance, that number is a bit inflated. Even so, let’s say 7,000 on average truly came to a game last season. Without even figuring out the amount of money those people might spend in the Coliseum and lost taxes, let’s just say they spend on average 5 dollars in the area. That’s 35,000 dollars lost to local business a night. Over the course of a season that would be almost a million and a half dollars lost to local business.
At this point it should be mentioned that Nassau County had it’s finances taken over by the state. This is not a county that can afford to be losing any money at this point. I’m sure my rough calculations don’t come close to the true amount that is going to be lost to the area.
So taking a bit of a break from my Islanders team that can never make the playoffs, I decided to do a fantasy draft. I love doing odd teams, so for this one I had just finished watching some Slap Shot and decided to try a goon team. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of players who are flat out enforcers in EHM, so I decided to start by grabbing Role Players and tough defenseman. Here is the team I ended up with;
Clutterbuck – Dubinsky – Tootoo
Shawn Thornton – V. Sobotka – Craig Adams
B. Sutherby – Konopka – Brule
Bissonette – Burish – Ryan Reaves
Chara – Byfuglien
L. Schenn – Garrison
Leopold – Komisarek
Enroth
Bernirer
I figured this team would get pretty much wrecked. I had also heard a rumor that the “hit and grind” strategy for lines was overpowered. So I tested it out by giving that strategy to all 4 lines. I had a feeling the game was a tad broken when they went undefeated during the pre-season and just flat out stomped everyone, barely allowing double digit shots some games. Then I started playing the regular season…
They are in 1st place with 58 points and a 25-7-1-7 record after 40 games. They are last in the league with 103 goals for. But they lead the league in Goals against with only 62, 2nd place has 101 GA. The PP is worst in the league with a 13.5%, but the PK leads the league at 85.37. Basically all of the top two lines had Career years in Goals, Assists and Points. Most of those notices were around games 40-50, although some like Brule hit those marks early.
For those of you interested, here’s the stats for the season.
The Calendar of the year
The Standings
The Leaguewide Stats
Unfortunately the team only made it to the Conference Finals before being beaten by the Rangers in 6 games. What ended up happening is that Chara got hurt for the last month of the season. During his time out we played 18 games and basically matched the number of losses we had in the first 64 games during the last 18 games. The team was never the same, even when he came back.
Still, getting this ragtag team to the Conference Finals was pretty amazing. And according to Wikipedia I set a new record with lowest amount of goals against in a season. We were also nominated for the following awards:
Jack Adams Award: Scott Gordon
Calder Memorial Award: Jhonas Enroth
Frank J Selke Award: Brandon Dubinsky, Shawn Thorton
Jhonas Enroth was our only winner, getting the Vezina and Jennings trophies.
I forgot to mention, despite being almost 10+ points ahead of everyone in the league when the All Star game happened, we were only represented at the game by Enroth. And in Islander fashion, Enroth didn’t even get any icetime in the game.
Well this was a fun little experiment, but I’m probably going to stop here. Unless someone is interested in seeing where it goes.
