Sports News
Will Islanders Ever Get their Due?
Being that we're in the midst of a summertime news lull, I've been spending a good portion of my television time watching the NHL Network. With at least a couple of weeks until the start of training camp, the network's mix of classic games and original programming has provided a welcome hockey fix.
Mixed in between those offerings are short vignettes focusing on a single player's career. You'll see plenty of Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Paul Coffey, Darryl Sittler and Guy Lafleur. Heck, there even have been short tributes to lesser lights who are still great hockey talents, such as Tom Barrasso and Ed Belfour.
But as I've been watching, I haven't been able to help but ask: Where are the Islanders? Of course, I'm not talking about the sad sack into which the once-powerful franchise has degenerated. I'm talking about the team that won four consecutive Stanley Cups from 1980 to 1983.
Today, five players from the team that won those 19 consecutive playoff series over five seasons -- Bryan Trottier, Mike Bossy, Clark Gillies, Denis Potvin and Billy Smith -- have a place in the Hockey Hall of Fame alongside their coach, Al Arbour. Bossy makes a brief appearance during one vignette, but he's just there so we can be reminded how the Great One eclipsed his run to 50 goals in 50 games with one of his own. But outside of occasional glimpses it's as though the franchise that arguably enjoyed the best run of success of any one based in the lower 48 is something of a hockey afterthought.
I need to reveal more than a bit of bias. Though I've lived in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia for more than two decades, my formative years as a hockey fan were spent on Long Island, just across the border from Queens and a 15-minute ride from Nassau Coliseum. When I first stepped on the ice in 1975, it was an action in part propelled by the emergence of the Islanders as a power in the NHL.
Granted, part of the reason the Islanders get overlooked is simply due to bad timing. Like it or not, that Islanders team was sandwiched between a Scotty Bowman-led Canadiens squad that won four Cups of its own from 1976 to 1979 and an Oilers team that won five Cups in seven seasons from 1984 to 1990 and is arguably the greatest in the history of the sport. When you're competing for attention while historically situated between teams of that caliber, it's easy to see how the Isles could get lost in the shuffle.
Still, you'd think there would be room for a vignette about Trottier, a 1,000-point scorer who won six Stanley Cups (two more with Pittsburgh) and was one of the most physically punishing centers in NHL history. While Bossy's achievement of 50 goals in 50 games was indeed obliterated by Gretzky's accomplishment, he's the only player to have scored 50 goals or more in nine consecutive seasons. At the time Potvin retired, he was the career leader in goals, assists and points for a defenseman. As for Gillies and Smith, if either played in the NHL today, he'd command a generous salary that would lay ruin to the cap of just about any team.
It's also important to reveal that after so many decades away from Long Island, my bona fides as an Islanders partisan are well in my rearview mirror. As one of my blogging friends has reminded me, I'm something of a journalist now and ought to be above such petty attachments. Still, it's hard for me not to look at the Isles as an old girlfriend with whom I had a lot of great times. And while I might not love her anymore, I'm sure not going to sit by while others pretend she doesn't deserve respect.
Here's hoping the folks at the NHL Network do something to correct the record.
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