Islander News Articles 10/2: NY 4, Boston 2

New York Islander Fan Central | 10/01/2007 05:00:00 AM | | | | | | | | |

Combining the news articles and the postgame today.

NYI.com game summary has the following:

"Any time you win your last preseason game, you have to be happy with that," said assistant coach Gerard Gallant. "I thought the performance of our veterans and overall was very good."

"We like what we have," said captain Bill Guerin. "We're a hard working team, and we're going to play as a team. We have 82 games in front of us, and we're going to play hard in every single one of them."

"Billy is a competitor, who competes hard," said Gallant. "He had a pretty good battle in front with Stuart. That's just part of the game."


With 1:22 left, Sim salted the game away with a sharp-angle shot for a 4-2 Islanders lead. Andy Hilbert earned the assist.

Defensemen
32 Brendan Witt – 24 Radek Martinek
25 Andy Sutton – 47 Marc-Andre Bergeron
4 Bryan Berard – 8 Bruno Gervais

Forwards
26 Ruslan Fedotenko – 89 Mike Comrie – 13 Bill Guerin
16 Jon Sim – 18 Mike Sillinger – 7 Trent Hunter
11 Andy Hilbert – 63 Josef Vasicek – 81 Miroslav Satan
15 Jeff Tambellini – 10 Richard Park – 27 Darryl Bootland

Newsday's article talks about the win, decision day regarding Berard, Tambellini, Bergenheim and how many skaters the club will carry.

* Signing Berard would create a surplus on defense, but Chris Campoli and Freddy Meyer, who sat out yesterday, can't be sent to Bridgeport without being exposed to possible waiver claims.

"One positive is that we have a lot more [salary] flexibility," Snow said. "Last year, we were right up against the cap at the beginning of the season."


* Berard, who was happy with his preseason play, said:

"I played five games and showed I'm healthy. My game's only going to get better because I've played just 50 games or so in three years. I'd really like to be an Islander."


* Forward Sean Bergenheim sat out yesterday, but that might have been to give Tambellini one more opportunity to stick. He began on the fourth line while Andy Hilbert moved up to take his place with Josef Vasicek and Satan.

* Asked about a possible return to Bridgeport, Tambellini said:

"That's not even on my radar right now. I'm pushing to play in this league every night. I'm going to do whatever it takes, whether it's playing second line or fourth line. I'm at the point where I need to make my way in this league and get a foot in the door."


Logan updated his blog on the lineup and numbers game before the Bruins game
here.

NYI Fan Central Comments:
Bergenheim played Friday and Saturday so he was not permitted to play Sunday according to NHL rules.

Missed the game but Islanders played an NHL lineup for the most part. Witt, Guerin are fighting and the shots against were low and the team closed the game strong with the two goals. Berard said he wants to sign here, now it's up to the club to create a spot for him or give it to someone else and not sign him but the staff does have a tough decision here and a numbers game to contend with. Satan scored on a slapshot which has been rare for him the last two seasons.

Boston Globe blog had some good ingame comments. Boston Herald had it's update here while Telegram has the best game report here.

Sound Tigers lost their final preseason game 2-0 at Hartford here. Michael Fornabaio 's blog reports the cuts to this point, the lines used in the preseason game and what's next here. Ct Post articles were about Gregg and Keith Johnson, roster decisions here and a feature on Matt Spiller here.