MELDING
New post on Lighthouse Hockey: LHH Zeitgeist EXCLUSIVE; Garth Snow's Pre-Draft Itinerary.
The find the parody articles I do to be pretty cathartic most of the time. This one a little less than others, though.
After a couple of years of trying to convince people that the current Islanders weren't the old Islanders, the Draft Day 2012 non-trade with the Blue Jackets may have undone all of it. It's very tough to rip on Mike Milbury for doing risky, unorthodox, potentially disastrous moves when Garth Snow starts doing them, too.
Now, as if it wasn't already, the next season must be a rousing success in order to push this latest episode into the background. This draft class will always be the one that was "almost traded in it's entirety." But if the Islanders emerge this year as a player in the Eastern Conference, those calls will be muted. It should be noted that none of these events are guaranteed, either.
Fortunately, in the NHL's silly season, the story's already lost some steam. But the meme will live for a while, even among Islanders fans. And certainly no sportswriter looking for an easy joke to fill column inches will fail to mention it repeatedly.
At least my jokes are an attempt to deflect, accept and understand a notable episode in my team's current history. I'm trying to make sense of how the Islanders operate and get a better read on where they're headed in the future, as well as how I feel about that direction. I'm not sure how successful this article was helping me do all this, but I guess it's better than just sitting around being pissed off.