Quick Saturday Update

Windsor Star: Jim Parker has an article on Windsor Spitfires training camp that has a few words on Josh Bailey.

Sports Illustrated: Alan Muir puts Islanders defenseman Mark Streit in his top five of players who could be a potential failure of a signing putting him ahead of Jeff Finger (Toronto), Michael Ryder (Boston), Jose Theodore (Washington) and Ryan Malone. (Tampa Bay)

NYI Fan Central Comments:
Mr Muir's reason's for Mark Streit failing here are reasonable but he failed to note he has steadily improved the last few years and is not a player with a lot of NHL mileage with his best likely ahead of him. It's hard to say what will happen here because the test will come when he struggles on defense and Scott Gordon considers using him as a forward as Montreal did to get his offensive skill in the lineup.

Some of the players Mr Muir did not list in the top five have seem to have more potential for failure than Streit.

Sure would be nice if SI finally did anything positive on the Islanders, there are a lot of players here with some upside but I guess it's not good for page views, it's amazing how the BlackHawks have been hyped along with St Louis the last few years.

edited-Jeff Gordon is not the Islanders new coach, someone contact NASCAR.

Prospect Notables

Sarnia Observer: Dave Borody explains the rules in the Ontario Hockey League only allow clubs to carry three overage prospects with coach Dave McQueen's comments as Sarnia opens training camp with Islander draft pick Justin DiBenedetto one of those overage players who will report to the Islanders training camp as Sarnia current has four overage players but a situation the coach says will work itself out within a month.

Mark Katic and Matt Martin were also listed among the fifty three players who will be at camp.

Windsor Star: Jim Parker reports many of the prospects will report this weekend for camp and will leave the club by the third exhibition game to join their NHL teams for prospects camp. Spitfires head coach Bob Boughner comments on Islanders draft pick Josh Bailey and what it means to have him on the club.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
Camps are starting up for these junior clubs this weekend or have began already.

Exhibition games start in about a week and then after some prospects play a few games they report to their NHL clubs for camp.

Outside of the Windsor Star which has a section for it's hockey team and put Friday's article in it's News section all the Islander junior prospects in the OHL and WHL has newspaper coverage available here that was easy to find today in the updated prospect section.

The QMJHL league has newspapers listed but many of those papers are French Canadian, I will keep trying to tweak this to get us the best newspaper links possible.

Islanders in terms of prospects right now the breakdown is as follows:
College-Fourteen
Canadian Junior Leagues-Eleven
Europe-Ten with many far off the radar unlikely to ever sign drafted several years ago with Tunik, Volkov, Stonkus and Axelsson under Milbury's tenure.

Figren is signed and playing in Europe. Petrov, Ullstrom, Johansson and Ridderwall round off the group, Niemi came here from Europe but will play in Canada.

Past prospects likely heading for Bridgeport like Joensuu, were not included in that mix but Marcinko was because there is a slight chance he could be back with Barrie.

All of the European prospects have had links updated to include their team websites/current profiles and statistics with the exception of Alexei Stonkus who's league from last year has apparently become a development league for the new KHL.

From what I can gather the KHL has not provided team links or websites to where Stonkus can be found nor is there a transfer from his last club reported.

Always kept tabs on Stonkus after his serious neck injury, any time I see he is still playing anywhere, it's more than enough for me.

Islander News Articles 8/22

The News Pictou County Nova Scotia: Report the Islanders will be sending an ITV camera crew up to Pictou County this weekend to cover the second annual Play the Pros event at John Brother MacDonald Stadium with Jon Sim's comments on the event started by Sim and the Devils Colin White.


ECHL.COM/serveral outlets: Report Andy Sertich was resigned by the Utah Grizzlies.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
His profile was updated back on 6/26 which is still on the sidebar because he played twenty eight games for the Sound Tigers last year. With the ECHL movement involving players it's not feasible to keep stats/profiles for entire rosters with so many changes, only the ones who played a significant time for Bridgeport will be added to the sidebar.

Sudbury Star: Bruce Heidman had Wolves owner Mark Burgess comments on what the plan is for Columbus draft pick Nikita Filatov if Blue Jacket management decide he should start the season in Juniors with Sudbury with regards to contracts in Russia and transfer paperwork.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
A few reasons why this was posted:
One to show that draft picks on the fence between NHL or junior hockey start their season with the pro clubs training camp.

Another would be to show what it's going to take for Filatov to play in Junior hockey if he does not make the Columbus roster.

Finally because players like Josh Bailey at his age it's NHL or juniors as the two options, there is no AHL/ECHL option at that age. Once they hit that nine or ten game mark in the NHL they cannot retrun to juniors and must remain in the NHL as we saw long ago with Tim Connolly.

Quick Hits:
* Long time assistant coach for Scott Gordon Rob Murray was hired as new coach in Providence so he will not be coming to New York.

* I think Mr Botta set a record for longest paragraph as a title to an article in his latest blog entry. It seemed to fit in the widget but I'm going to throw a little criticism here at Mr Botta because if he's writing and telling us to ignore Newsday or the articles from an Anthony Rieber or Jim Baumbach or it will only get worse because of the what it generates in terms of page views and hits why did he not ignore Mr Kelley's article in SI which a week ago instead of giving him more page views and hits which will make Mr Kelley's bosses happy?

Mr Botta's heart is in the right place with his comments and intentions just like the folks who did the same with Mr Rieber and Mr Baumbach. I hope he understands this cannot be selective where we pick and choose the folks who put out this kind of content on the club.

* Finally the widget on the sidebar with the schedule now includes all the Islanders preseason games, impressive work from the folks behind this.

Thursday Islander Notables

NHL.com: Brian Compton has an outstanding blog entry with comments from head coach Scott Gordon and general manager Garth Snow Thursday where they both discuss the hiring process and what they will have to happen for this to work on the ice with a lot of information from both along with the plan for the young players and the veterans.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
Easily the best article/blog I have read to date in terms of questions and answers from both the writer, coach and general manager. Mr Compton knew his stuff and asked about all the veterans on a roster that is building a youth movement but could skate nine players who are at least 30 years of age and the important questions of the goaltenders workload and his working relationship with the general manager.

Only place Mr Compton falls short here is not noting goaltending was not a factor for the team in that second Ranger game and Dubie was outstanding in the win at the garden prior to that.

Sportsnet.com: Chris Nichols has an article with his speculation what the line combinations will be for each club in the Atlantic and did a very good job on the Islanders not only having the players on the correct wings but noted the strong competition for spots with the options as he reviewed the first three lines.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
I think Mr Nichols did outstanding with his line combos which for now leaves Jon Sim, Hilbert, Park, Nielsen, Walter, Colliton and Josh Baley (for openers) battling for fourth line spots to say nothing of the enforcer role between a Jackman or a Rechlicz?

I wrote this a while back and I see no other place to go write I think Mike Sillinger's spot on the roster could be in play sooner than later. Right or wrong I keep coming back to that along with Andy Hilbert who also worked with Scott Gordon.

NYI Fan Central New Prospect Center Open

After a lot of work behind the scenes this summer our new redesigned prospect center is now up and running at NYIFC and I think it's a winner that everyone will enjoy that is a vast improvement over year one where where all it did was link to the teams website profile.

Each prospect now has a section of it's own with information from the teams they play for now in North America along with stats, information, website and newspaper coverage in some cases. European prospects were also given links to follow stats and information that will include links to their teams directly if possible.

Also a new feeder was added to this blog that has College, Canadian League News and Pro Hockey Leagues in general.

Some things were simply not available, many college clubs do not have dedicated independent newspaper coverage. I did provide many newspaper links to CHL teams but many were in French and no paper had a specific team feeder.

Hopefully I got all the players who transferred correct, any mistakes let me know and this is something that will change a lot as players move around, these are the changes to this point:

* Corey Trivino Stouffville Spirit Ontario Provincial Junior A Hockey League transferred Boston University.

* David Toews- Shattuck-St. Mary’s High School in Minnesota to University of North Dakota.

* Blake Kessel Waterloo USHL To University of New Hampshire Hockey East NCAA.

* Troy Mattila Tri-City Storm USHL to Darmouth ECAC.

* Jason Gregiore from Lincoln Stars (USHL) to University of North Dakota.

* Aaron Ness from Roseau High School to Minnesota Gophers.

* Matt Donovan Cedar Rapids USHL & Denver University WCHA:
Donovan will play for the RoughRiders again this season while also attending the University of Denver. Eligibility rules differ in hockey. As long as Donovan doesn't receive any money with Cedar Rapids, he can play for both clubs.

Finally:
I have already been setting up for Moncton coverage, no specific feeders but I will set up a link list for those Newspapers for days I cannot update.

Enjoy...

Islander News Articles 8/21

Islanders website: Has the recap of last night's RE/MAX Open House
with new head coach Scott Gordon where he took fan questions, Frans Nielsen also was part of last night's event and gave his comments.

Islanders TV: Has a fourteen minute video of last night's open house with Scott Gordon.

Islanders Television: Has Scott Gordon's fifteen minute interview on FAN960.

Newsday: Katie Strang covered last night's open house with Scott Gordon's comments again as he again talked about incorporating the teams speed into the game plan and will be calling his players over the next week to introduce himself and try to get the to buy into the clubs system and philosophy.

Newsday: Katie Strang has a blog last night on the event before above article where Mr Dey's promotion was included.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
I'm not sure what to make of this and I'll admit I completelty forgot about last night's event. A lot of what we read about Scott Gordon was he's all about defense and keeping shots against down, second time now I have read him talking about this club's speed to play more of an attacking style of game.

Ted Nolan on countless occasions talked about how his team had to play the style they did because they did not have the speed and skill of other clubs where by contrast we read alot about Ted Nolan not playing a 1-3-1 until the very end of the season against Pittsburgh. The former coach also was furious in a game against Philadelphia where they scored three rare first period goals where he felt they cheated their defensive system for offense. That was the game a few pucks hit the SMG boards and found their way in front of DiPietro on strange bounces and the Isles blew the lead and the game.

My take on this is the new coach is going to discover this is a very slow group of veteran forwards who are easy to predict and defend. Bill Guerin, Trent Hunter, Mike Sillinger and Doug Weight are hardly fast skaters.

This is a trend that has gone back several years and roster reincarnations here, Jason Blake carried the puck for everyone and got them setup in the zone.

I do not know what Scott Gordon is seeing in these tapes that I did not see last season, Ted Nolan talked about the lack of speed and skill often and that's not how this club would win games. For his thirty odd games Jeff Tambellini did not look fast, he looked tenative and uncertain.

I guess we'll see. This club was never faster than the stretch Bergenheim-Yashin-Robert Nilsson were a line in early March 2006.

Chris Dey Named Islanders President

Islanders website: Announced Chris Dey has been named team President with comments from Mr Dey along with Islanders owner Charles Wang.

The release notes Mr Dey will expand his responsibilities beyond Sales, Marketing and Event Operations. He will oversee all business operations for the team as well as the Islanders Children's Foundation, the Islanders office in China and the Charles B. Wang Ice Hockey Project Hope in China and will also work with the Lighthouse Development Corporation on the planning, as well as the sales and marketing, of the transformed Nassau Coliseum.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
Seems like an awful lot for one individual who has the overwhelming job of trying to fill seats at the Nassau Coliseum for hockey games and set an ambitious goal of ten thousand season seats tickets before Ted Nolan's departure and a flood of negative press from Newsday which from an outsiders view seems impossible, but who knows given the clubs earlier release of seven hundred odd new subscriptions sold that does not tell us how many did not renew.

I'm somewhat surprised it got a lot of play in the sports media to where it was even in the AP/CP coverage.

I do not recall the Islanders naming a team President since Bill Torrey's tenure (David Seldin was New York Sports Ventures President) and clearly Mr Torrey was involved in hockey decisions, but this apparently is something different with the release clearly about business.

I know some fans will not give Mr Dey a fair chance, but any idea he came here this summer to take over is a total misconception as the Pacific Business Journal's Janice Magin reported back in May of 2007 around the time Mike Milbury announced he would not be returning here that Mr Wang had intended to hire Mr Dey and bring him here full-time.

No doubt many are aware of his background in Hawaii which did not end well for an arena II football team Mr Wang owned which folded back in 2004. Pacific Business Journal also had Janis L. Magin here cover the story of the folding of that club in 2004 with Mr Dey's comments about the circumstances at the time.

Bottom line here unless were inside the Islander offices we have no idea beyond blind speculation what goes on.

I know folks will throw out those infamous Espn attendance links and point out the Islanders finished last but a lot of those numbers are clearly announced by clubs and that's not a reliable barometer for true attendance.

Let's also give Mr Dey his due here because for those who go right to Espn attandance links as the gospel there is another side to that for the Islanders and despite missing the playoffs, the team had it's highest average per game paid attendance since 2002, and a year over year increase that was top five in the league. The group sales department ranked third in the league in total sales and corporate sponsorship sales set a team record last season.

Some spin both ways? Perhaps, but the Islanders did report eighty three percent of the building was filled on avgerage and you filter out those early weeknight games it would have been much higher.

Good luck to Mr Dey and from an Islander fan viewpoint, we all better hope he does a great job because an awful lot is riding on what Mr Wang has entrusted him with.

NYI Fan Central Update

Some changes at NYI Fan Central.

As always I'm always trying to upgrade this blog to bring more information and features to it for everyone.

I announce these changes sometimes so everyone knows where to find new features here along with things they may have been moved because some folks may may come here just to find links to other sites.

For the remainder of the summer up until training camp begins the new brighter page look will we be third jersey (home white) version of this blog.

So what's next?

* I have been bulking up sidebar with some links to some Independent Islander Fan Sites, many links are included. My requirement for listing folks here are regular hockey updates and no profanity from your site.

If interested please send an e-mail.

* We now have a Hockey Database (hockeydb.com) player finder widget from their excellent site added to the NHL Trades/Transactions/Free Agent Signings section which will now be a permanent fixture here so we can follow player transactions, not just trade deadline days or July 1st.

* Faceoff.com has a feeder of sorts showing it's latest update which is now listed below the picture link to that site.

* I found something that has an RSS feed for the Sound Tigers, the Ct Post does not have exclusive Sound Tiger rss feeds for Mr Fornabaio so where stuck and I asked him enough about that last year which is beyond his control.

* I also added back in the Sound Tigers live scoreboard widget which will have live game scores and the schedule. If AHL.com comes up with something better I'll go with that but it seems no one in North America has created anything for live game AHL updates to put on a blog, but the Utah Grizzlies are offering a toobar for computers which will not be here because it's not for blogs.

* When the Isles announce their new blog box members I will add them all to the current feeder for it regardless if I am part of the blog box moving forward.

* I pulled the Isles rotonews widget for the summer because there was just not enough updates for it, however I did add a new one for the entire NHL in the media section toward the bottom of the blog because they only reference information from newspapers and do all the teams. The specific Isles widget will return to the sidebar along with NHL scoreboards, standings when camp opens along with our classic look.

* I moved the Daily News, Times and Post feeds below Newsday up from the bottom of the blog, there are too many sites down there now to keep them buried despite how terrible a job their editors do providing our club coverage. If anyone remembers a very old movie called Walking Tall (Joe Don Baker Version) the scene where he puts the judges chambers in the men's room was kind of where I decided to put the Post, Times and News for year one of this blog in our media section given the decisions of their editors with regard to our team.

* I'm working on a fix for not having a message board this season that used to have Mr Prospects outstanding game by game prospect updates for all of us but for now I have added a link to the prospect coverage section that includes Newspaper Coverage for all Junior leagues in North America, I also found a link that can reference most prospect boxscores in North America.

What's in the works/under consideration as a solution is a brand new widget like the one we have now for the local writers, Islanders website updates and the separate one for the blog box updates.

This new one will be the most involved of all because it will have every RSS feed from every North American/College paper that covers a specific club where an Islander prospect plays. I'm not sure how many of those papers link up to their hockey teams that way and depending on how this goes will determine if I do it or not because many small town/college papers do not have specific rss feeds for hockey, Tsn does not even have it for hockey coverage so it's a long shot but if I that local paper has an feed we can get their game coverage so we have more information.

Linking to the major league sites (OHL, WHL, QMJHL) will give us league wide updates but that cannot be narrowed down to specific Islander prospects, I will also include this in these feeders.

What I will do for sure and have almost finished behind the scenes is locating links for our prospects that linking to their latest games or team boxscores so you can visit here and follow what they are doing, some leagues do game by game player breakdown, others do not (QMJHL) or you have to go to the boxscore sections.

I'm not sure if I can do this for the European prospects but first things first.

I will never have the time to go from page to page and put together a digest of weekly/daily game summaries as Mr Prospects does so well. I think that's an element of coverage our fans need.

Anyway that's what's up around here, this is one of my pre-scheduled vacation blogs on the timer.

Updated Wednesday:
I spoke for about twenty minutes on Tuesday afternoon with Professional Hockey Writers Association President Kevin Allen as we discussed briefly the process for joining the association and a lot of hockey-media related subjects. It was very classy of him to go out of his way like that to return my call and was a pleasure to speak with and taught me a lot in that short time.

I will have more on this in a few days.

Islander/NHL Notables

The News Pictou County: Has an uncredited article on Saturday's second annual Play the Pros event will take place at the John Brother MacDonald Stadium in New Glasgow which was started last year by Jon Sim and Colin White of the Devils. Jon Sim comments, Joey MacDonald will participate.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
What's fun about an article like this is last year's photo has Jon Sim wearing the Islanders 2006-07 jersey before the Reebok edge designed was released, Sim never wore that jersey playing in New York.

I referenced this information a few weeks ago and Bruno Gervais should also be one of the players participating.

I found it very interesting Ross McKeon of Yahoo Sports did an article about teams contracting here in a feature about things he would change around the NHL. Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis in his blog fired back with a strong response here as to why it's not feasible with a few choice words for the Yahoo sports senior writer who in turn responded to Mr Leonsis here and of course started by writing about page views.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
Whatever happened to the good old player feature stories?

Is it really about page views for so many of these sites and revenue from their advertisers so they throw anything against the wall hoping it sticks and stirs up angry/passionate reaction? I was kind of offended Ross McKeon started his response to the Caps owner with that. It's just another reason I'm conservative with what I post here and I try and draw my own line between professional and amateur but I have included Mr McKeon's team ranking and work because clearly he is a professional and will be part of our blogs coverage regardless of content.

As for the article Mr Leonsis points out the almost countless reasons contraction is not feasible and it's impossible to argue his reasoning. I could sit here and make a case for the contraction of all thirty teams in this league at one time or another including all three New York area teams.

The team that won the Stanley Cup last year used to give away cars to get people to attend games when the New York Islanders owned this league, the Wings had problems selling out playoff games the last few years and play in one of the oldest building with the least revenue streams with it's management claiming it needed to make the finals to break even in past seasons with Wings president Jimmy Devellano's comments here about the situation in Detroit here during the lockout era.

Absolutely no club in this league is immune to being included in contraction discussion for folks who wish to start them and for me anyone who wants to start one of those discussions should include his/her favorite team first.

Congratulations to former Islander Gord Dineen who was named head coach of the Iowa Chops with the Desmiones Register doing a feature by Lisa Colonno
here.

Canadian Press here has an updated on the situation with forward Alexander Radulov with comments from Bill Daly from the NHL and KHL President Alexander Medvedev.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
Good for the NHL turning down any compensation for Alexander Radulov, he signed a contract to play here, he should honor it and play here. If he signed his contract first in Russia first he should play there and honor that deal.

What Rudulov pulled on the Predators here is flat out bush league, you sign a contract you honor it, you don't decide to sign another one and leave for more money.

KHL president Alexander Medvedev says there no mechanism in the KHL rules to force Radulov's return to the NHL, and said the matter might have to be resolved in court is all well and good but if he was really interested in doing things properly he would be just as quick to blast Radulov and suspend him from playing in his league until he completes his obligation to Nashville as he is to threaten NHL players that they could be suspended from international competition. I know it's fashionable to pile on Gary Bettman and Bill Daly here but in this case it's not fair.

Calgary Herald/Several outlets: Bruce Dowbiggin has more on the Todd Bertuzzi-Marc Crawford-Steve Moore lawsuit from the incident years ago with Crawford now telling his side of what happened in court documents.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
I would not want this hanging over my new coach as training camp is about to begin if Crawford was in any serious consideration if I were Garth Snow. Islanders coaching job is hard enough without that to work with as a sidebar. I wonder if it was a factor for Dean Lombardi combined with a losing record as this finally made it's way into the court system the last few months and received more publicity?

Hard to believe this is the same Todd Bertuzzi who was roughed up as an Islander rookie over a decade ago.

A little mini-vacation Islanders update

A little mini-vacation Islander update on what's up around the club.

NHL.com: Dan Rosen has an excellent feature article today on Josh Bailey with his comments along with that of assistant gm Ryan Jankowski and scout Eric Cairns.


Hockey Hall of Fame: Kevin Shea is the Editor of Publications and Online Features for the Hockey Hall of Fame has a story that includes Mikael Samuelsson of the Wings bringing the cup to former Islander Cup Winner Mats Hallin before the league adapted this fantastic tradition.

Erie Times-News: Victor Fernandes had a feature a few days ago about Islander defender Chris Campoli at a Kahkwa Club event benefited the Shriners Hospital for Children and Kahkwa Scholarship Fund for Caddies as he pronounced himself healthy and ready for training camp in New York.

Inside College Hockey.com: Joe Gladziszewski has a feature article on Islander prospect Tyrell Mason with Clarkson head coach George Roll's comments.

* The Utah Grizzlies announced that they have re-signed forward Ryan Kinasewich, who has led the team in scoring each of the last three seasons and was added back to the prospect profiles because he played over twenty games for Bridgeport last season.

* Michael Fornabaio reported in the Ct Post Sound Tigers blog Justin Mapletoft is headed for Austria.

New York vs Rangers 1984 Game Five

I was at this game sitting a few rows up from where Morrow shot, too bad there is no camera angle from the other side.


Amazing how we NEVER get to see the Sportschannel Version with Jiggs McDonald calling all these great games.

That's right, the other team owns that version.

Oh well, hopefully a good vacation blog to pre-schedule for a Monday.
Enjoy.