In this Hockey History story from December of 2013, Islanders star center John Tavares was already leaving his mark on the Isles. And Tavares welcomed the challenge of making the Islanders a great team.
In December of 2013, the New York Islanders were led by young star center John Tavares -- and in this story from THN''s archive, Tavares' impact on the Isles was readily appaarent.
RISING LAUGHING STOCK ISLANDERS
By Ken Campbell
It was one of those games that, if the New York Islanders had lost, would have been the biggest injustice in the history of the sporting world, or at least since Hulk Hogan lost the title to The Undertaker back in 1991. Like infamous wrestling referee Earl Hebner, the officials made a couple questionable calls. The Senators scored a goal the Islanders felt didn’t cross the line, which was all they needed on a night when Evgeni Nabokov was porous.
Including the shootout, they fired 59 shots at the Senators and twice battled back from two-goal deficits. And they won. They won the game 5-4 and for that night at least, Liz Lemon’s former boyfriend and Kevin Connolly could go to bed not distraught.
All right, that should do it for the Islanders jokes. Because here’s the thing: the Islanders aren’t playing the part of cuddly, lovable punch line anymore. After years of a frustrating rebuild and stalled efforts to build a new rink dubbed The Lighthouse Project, the franchise has emerged from the fog and is beginning to see the light.
This was no more evident than in Ottawa, when the Isles stuck to their game plan and won a contest they would have lost a couple years ago. The former Islanders would have allowed their woes to consume them and the subsequent defeat would have been another lesson in how to lose. “Yeah, like, ‘Here we go again,’ then three or four in a row,” says coach Jack Capuano. “I know what you mean.”
The Islanders are a flawed team that plays in a flawed division in a flawed conference, but there’s a positive vibe around this group. The early-season trade that saw management deal fan favorite Matt Moulson to the Buffalo Sabres for Thomas Vanek was a clear statement by the Islanders. They gave up a first-rounder in 2014 and a second-rounder in 2015, sending the message they’re getting sick of waiting around for the future.
They want to win now and, hey, they play in the Metropolitan Division, so anything is possible. Are they there yet? Not even close. Despite them publicly backing Nabokov, their goaltending needs an upgrade. Their penalty killing is pretty leaky and they still sometimes look like the old Islanders, as evidenced by a 6-2 loss to the Washington Capitals in early November that followed a two-game win streak. It was a game in which the Capitals scored four goals in five minutes, prompting resident star and captain John Tavares to opine, “It should be embarrassing.”
Perhaps that’s a little bit of a stretch, particularly for a franchise that has had many embarrassments over the past two decades. But now that they’re growing up, those awkward, gangly years are behind them. And the fact they find losses like the one to the Capitals embarrassing is actually a sign of progress.
So is the acquisition of Vanek, a big-ticket player with an expiring contract who comes with no guarantees beyond this season. Moulson grew up with and became a high-end scorer with the Islanders and probably would have been happy to stay long-term. But GM Garth Snow made the determination the Islanders weren’t going to compete for a Stanley Cup with Moulson as a go-to player.
But here’s what might be most telling about the Vanek trade and what it says about the culture change within the organization. They made the deal largely because they didn’t like where they were in the standings and how they were playing. In March and April of last season, the Islanders went 16-6-5 and were as good as any team in the league down the stretch.
Then after taking the Pittsburgh Penguins to six games in the first round of the playoffs, they created a level of expectation they hadn’t had in years. It wasn’t like they gave the Penguins an I-can’t-believe-we-actually-won-this-series kind of scare, but they did extend one of the most powerful teams in the league. The Islanders lost two games in overtime, including Game 6 when they blew three one-goal leads on home ice.
“What I liked about our group last year was it didn’t matter who we played, who we dressed, we had that attitude and swagger in the second half of the season that we were going to get to where we wanted to get,” Capuano says. “And then when we got to the playoffs to play Pittsburgh, we weren’t satisfied just being in the playoffs and playing Pittsburgh. We’re going to win the series.”
But this season, for the first time in what feels like forever, the Islanders had actually been underachieving. Prior to making the deal for Vanek, they were a fairly pedestrian 4-4-3 and coming off two games that highlighted their inconsistency – an impressive come-from-behind win in Pittsburgh followed up by a stinker at home to the lowly Philadelphia Flyers. New York has gone from a team that expects to lose to one that now expects to win. Vanek should help on that front, at least for the rest of this season. “We made the playoffs last year and it should have happened the year before,” Snow says. “When we play to our capabilities, we can win on any given night.”
The Islanders are young, fast, kind of small and, coincidentally, the lightest team in the league. Only five teams – the Sabres, Toronto Maple Leafs, Carolina Hurricanes, Columbus Blue Jackets and Winnipeg Jets – skew younger than the Islanders’ average age of 27.1. More important, it is a squad that has grown up together, taken its lumps, experienced a little success and remained relatively intact.
The result is a group that Vanek noticed, shortly after he arrived, has a unique esprit de corps. “It’s a fast team and it plays hard every night and when I say it’s close-knit, I mean it’s really close-knit,” he says. “I haven’t seen this in years. I came in and I see each and every guy working out together and doing all the little things together. It was great to see.”
Vanek also noticed a difference when it came to how quickly the Islanders move their feet and the puck. For the last little while in Buffalo, Vanek and his teammates were confined largely to chasing the other team around the ice. With so little zone and puck possession time, Vanek had become accustomed to a system that didn’t put much of an emphasis on speed. That’s not the case with the youthful Islanders. Man for man, they might be the fastest team in the league.
Michael Grabner can win a footrace with anyone and Frans Nielsen, who spent the first month of the season among the top 10 scorers, was finally beginning to capitalize on a lot of the chances his blazing speed was creating. Even on his own line, Vanek is seeing a hurry-up offense with Kyle Okposo and Tavares, who has arguably worked harder than any other player in the league to improve his skating. And that’s rather unique for a young NHLer. Many in their first years in the league work hardest at the things they’ve already mastered.
And what you end up with is a player without many dimensions to his game. Tavares, by comparison, gets up and down the ice much better than he has in the past and it’s made him a 200-foot player. “I’ve played with some fast players,” Vanek says, “but to have eight or nine of them, that’s pretty impressive.”
If the Islanders could only speed up the clock on the next two seasons, everything would be even better. Sentenced to play in the dilapidated Nassau Coliseum for this season and next, the team should be peaking as a franchise right around the time they move into the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for 2015-16. After years of political one-upmanship and stonewalling for a new rink, the Islanders made the decision to move to Brooklyn, despite the fact Barclays Center is a basketball venue with a current seating capacity of only 14,500 for hockey.
That could be increased to 15,813 for the Islanders, the kinds of attendance numbers that would help them wade their way out of years of accumulated red ink. There will be bad sight lines and obstructed views at Barclays, but the Islanders will maintain their local roots and move into a state-of-the-art arena. The hipsters and bohemians there will love the hockey culture, especially the playoff beards, and the players will likely not have to relocate.
The Islanders plan to keep their practice rink at or near the current location in Syosset and will charter a couple cars on the Long Island Rail Road to go into Brooklyn for the games. As the original home for everyone from Jay-Z to Neil Simon, Brooklyn has become a destination spot, one that will benefit the franchise’s profile.
And right around that time, the Islanders should be building toward the status of being a perennial playoff contender. As players such as Tavares, Okposo and Josh Bailey continue to mature, the Islanders will continue to build their roster, secure in the knowledge free agents such as Vanek will at least know where the team is going to be 10 years from now. It will be a delicate balancing act, however.
Tavares is the crown jewel of the franchise and he has made his commitment to the team, with four years left after 2013-14 on a deal that will pay him $6 million a season from 2014-15 through ’17-18. Vanek is in to keep the last year of his seven-year, $50-million deal that carries a cap hit of $7.1 million and a current salary of $6.4 million. There were reports Buffalo approached Vanek this summer with an offer to make him the highest-paid player in the NHL, one that he disputes.
But the question is, can the Islanders make Vanek the highest-paid player on the team ahead of Tavares? They’re going to have to do that if they want to keep him. And there will be players in the future that will command salaries much higher than Tavares’. For the Islanders, it certainly isn’t a cap issue. They’re still the lowest-spending team in the league and that’s with – wait for it – them still on the hook for $2.2 million on the Alexei Yashin buyout this season and next.
Vanek wanted to wait to see where the Sabres were going with their rebuilding project and when he saw that it was right to the bottom of the NHL standings, he made it clear he wasn’t going to be a part of that kind of growing process. There’s no such worry with the Islanders. They are a team on the rise, going into a new rink with a certain amount of good vibe surrounding them. And if the salary cap goes up significantly from $64.3 million – meaning the $44-million floor will go up as well–even the Islanders are going to have to spend money.
So the best thing the team could do with Vanek is create a winning atmosphere where he can also have personal success. The latter is being taken care of with him playing on the top line with Tavares and Okposo. The former will take care of itself if the team can play up to its potential and take advantage of being in the NHL’s worst division. But it’s more than that. The Island, well, it has a certain stigma that takes living and working there to shake.
Part of the problem is the arena. For his part, Snow himself had a negative perception of Long Island when he signed there as a free agent after playing in Quebec, Philadelphia, Vancouver and Pittsburgh. Doug Weight, former Islander who’s now an assistant coach with the team, thought he was going to retire in St. Louis, but moved to Long Island and he and his family fell in love with the place.
“Sometimes when a player comes here and he hasn’t been part of our organization, he’s really only seen the parking lot between the Marriott and the Coliseum,” Snow says. “Those players don’t really know what Long Island is all about. I’m pretty confident that once we have a player in our organization, we have a pretty good shot at being able to keep him.”
Snow and the Islanders have actually done a remarkable job of locking up their young talent to long-term deals for, relatively speaking, little money. After this season, Tavares has four more years on his contract with a cap hit of $5.5 million. Josh Bailey is in for four more years at $3.3 million and Okposo and Cal Clutterbuck are around for two and three years, respectively, at $2.8 million. Promising 23-year-old defenseman Travis Hamonic has six more on his deal at just $3.9 million.
What also speaks to their depth, and part of the reason why they thought they could give up first- and second-round picks to get Vanek, is that Snow no longer seems intent on rushing young players into the NHL. Case in point is Ryan Strome, the fifth overall pick in 2011 and the Islanders’ top prospect. Projected ultimately as the No. 2 center behind Tavares, Strome is a top-10 scorer in the American League and was second in rookie scoring. The Islanders were 10th in the NHL in last season’s edition of THN Future Watch and have a crew of solid, if not unspectacular, NHL prospects on the way.
But there’s still work to do to make this roster into one that can legitimately compete for a championship and that work will likely be done in free agency. The Islanders have built through the draft and lived through lean times, the same way the Pittsburgh Penguins and Chicago Blackhawks did, but can we expect the same results a few years down the road?
When you compare the blueprints, they don’t exactly match up. The Penguins took the scorched-earth policy to their rebuild. It almost caused the franchise to move, not locally like the Islanders, but far, far away. It has created a team, however, that should legitimately challenge for the Stanley Cup for the next decade (if their goalies can only stop getting a case of the yips in the playoffs).
In a five-year span, the Penguins got Ryan Whitney at fifth overall (2002), Marc-Andre Fleury first (2003), Evgeni Malkin second (2004), Sidney Crosby first (2005) and then Jordan Staal second (2006), with what amounts to a total of 11 draft slots. Between 2003 and 2007, the Blackhawks got Brent Seabrook, Cam Barker, Jack Skille, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane with 28 slots. The Washington Capitals built their core, which includes Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom and Karl Alzner, with 45 slots. The Islanders, meanwhile, got Tavares, Bailey, Okposo and Nino Niederreiter (who they dealt to the Minnesota Wild for Clutterbuck) with 84 draft slots in five years.
The key to the entire plan remains Tavares, who’s quickly inserting himself into the NHL’s elite. With Vanek and Okposo on his wings, there’s no reason why he won’t fully exploit his talents. Tavares took over the captaincy once Mark Streit left for Philadelphia and he has embraced the role with gusto. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” Capuano says. “Guys like Johnny are looking at other elite players in the league and that’s just natural. That’s what those guys do. They’re looking at what a Phil Kessel is doing or how a Crosby is doing and Johnny is no different. He strives to be the best player he can be.”
And like his team, Tavares is maturing right before our very eyes. Heck, he even looks like a hockey player now, thanks to taking a puck to the face in a pre-training camp workout that knocked out his four front teeth. Tavares had the requisite dental work done, including getting four posts put in to anchor his new fake teeth. Then in just the fourth game of the season, Tavares took another puck in the mouth in Chicago and they all fell out. For now, he’s going to go with what hockey players call a “flipper,” which is a dental plate that goes in and out of the mouth depending on whether or not you’re going to a dinner party that night.
A gap-toothed Bobby Clarke-type of photo with the Stanley Cup might be years away. It might never come for Tavares or the Islanders. But there is a vibe around this team that hasn’t been present for years. Fish sticks logos, John Spano ownership escapades and the Rick DiPietro saga are behind them now and better days lie ahead. “That’s the exciting part,” Tavares says. “We’re just dipping our toes in the water. But it’s just an opportunity for us and now we have to go out there and take advantage of it.”