Islanders Mismanagement
December 29, 2005
I was reading an article that mentioned one of the Islanders bad trades from recent years and I decided to do a little homework to look at what the Islanders might have looked like if they had passed on a couple trades.
Let’s go back to June 2000. Mike Milbury in his infinite wisdom decided to trade Roberto Luongo and Olli Jokinen for Mark Parrish and Oleg Kvasha. They then used their #1 overall pick to draft the grossly over-rated Rick DePietro and passed on Dany Heatley who was taken #2 by Atlanta.
Milbury would then beat that move the following year by trading Zdeno Chara, Bill Muckalt, and the #1 pick for Alexei Yashin. Wow…even straight up, Chara for Yashin is a bad deal, but guess who was taken with the #1 pick…Jason Spezza.
So just imagine the Islanders with Luongo in net, Chara on the blueline and Jokinen and Spezza centering the top two lines with Heatley on the wing. Pretty nice. Too bad Milbury couldn’t hang up the phone instead of making those deals, but what do you expect from someone who’s biggest claim to fame is clubbing a fan with his own shoe.
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[...] Less than two weeks after I wrote about the mismanagement of the Islanders, Mike Milbury fired head coach Steve Sterling before announcing that he was stepping down as GM. The kicker is that Milbury isn’t leaving the team, but actually getting a promotion and will not only be the boss of the new GM, but most likely play a key role in the selection process. I can’t help but think that Neil Smith will be a candidate. « And Don’t Let the Door Hit You in the Ass [...]