COMMENTARY
Snow job? Islanders’ fate rests with GM
Hockey-by-committee no longer in use
On Friday, Garth Snow will either celebrate the beginning of his third year as Islanders general manager, or the end of his first week, depending upon how you look at it.
Snow was officially given the title July 18, 2006, as a hasty replacement for the ousted Neil Smith, but it wasn’t until Monday that he officially got the job. Now, after two years, we might finally learn if he is up to it.
The firing of Ted Nolan on Monday, a mercy killing if ever there was one, signals the beginning, at long last, of the Garth Snow era, and an end, if Snow is to be believed, of the hockey-by-committee that the Islanders have practiced — and failed dismally at — over eight seasons.
The main problem, of course, is that it was a committee of one — or more accurately, a committee of Wang, as in owner Charles. For years now, it has been the Wang way or the highway. Losing games hasn’t seemed to bother him. Neither have empty seats at the dreadful Nassau Mausoleum, nor has (presumably) hemorrhaging money.
In his own special way, Charles Wang was not unlike many retired gentlemen of a certain age who spend all their free time puttering around with hobbies, which in his case happens to be the systematic screwing up of a once-great hockey team.
“It’s impossible to get inside this guy’s head, to figure out what he’s trying to do,” one former Islanders employee told me Monday. “All that seems to be important to him is, who’s the fair-haired boy today?”
For a while, that title was held by Nolan, exiled from the NHL for nearly a decade after winning Coach of the Year and in effect losing his job with the Buffalo Sabres in the same season, a rare daily double.
Wang took great pride in resurrecting Nolan’s career, and Nolan repaid him in kind, leading the Islanders into the playoffs in his first season. But Nolan’s position as Wang’s Boy was gradually usurped, first by Alexei Yashin, then by Rick DiPietro (with whom he partied at an “American Idol” concert at Nassau Coliseum) and now, apparently, by Snow, quite possibly the first man in the history of the NHL to go from backup goalie to GM without so much as an internship.
Naturally, the belief was that Snow was Wang’s puppet, installed merely to inhabit a desk that Smith actually thought he would be working from.
That belief was helped in no small part by “the committee,” a think tank consisting of Wang, former players Bryan Trottier and Pat LaFontaine, and deposed GM Mike Milbury, an unworkable arrangement a hockey insider likened to “having your ex-wife still living in the house.”
No decision, from a free-agent signing to a takeout lunch order, was made without input from every member of the committee. “It’s a joke,” one player agent told me. “You go to the draft and you see them basically sitting on each others’ laps around the draft table together.”
Neil Smith was somehow able to coexist for an entire year with Mike Keenan, who is about as pleasant as pinkeye, but couldn’t stomach more than 41 days of the Islanders circus. He, like Snow, did not hire his head coach. He found no hierarchy in place, no chain of command. No one answered to him, but everyone answered to Wang.
Snow, too, worked under similar conditions for the first two years but that, presumably, is about to change. According to Snow, Nolan’s firing was the result of “philosophical differences regarding the direction of the hockey team.” More specifically, Snow wanted to go with younger, quicker and presumably less expensive players. Nolan — in the last year of a contract Wang pointedly refused to extend — preferred to gamble his future on veterans.
“I can’t blame Nolan, because I’ve never heard of a coach in the NHL who wanted to play with young guys,” one GM told me. “Coaches in the NHL are judged by wins and losses. You really expect a guy with one year left on his contract to be happy losing while developing players for his successor?”
Now, Nolan doesn’t have to worry about such things. His successor will, and his success will depend very strongly on how good — or bad — a GM Snow turns out to be.
