Sorry for jumping around so much today guys. I just have a bunch of things I want to address.

Sillinger’s return- Like I said yesterday, this is going to be good on several fronts for the Islanders. Nevertheless, I think Isles head coach Scott Gordon summed it up pretty nicely a few days ago when he said getting Silly back was like a mid-season trade.

Martinek reinjured? - According to Greg Logan’s blog, Radek Martinek will be out after banging his shoulder up against the Senators.  With Bruno Gervais also injured, it looks like Thomas Pock will get another chance to prove himself after clearing waivers a few days ago. In my opinion, Martinek has got to have the worst luck in the world. It’s like he’s got a black cat in his hockey bag or something. If he doesn’t start either taking the necessary steps to make sure he doesn’t get injured again without sacrificing his play in the offseason or taking showers with garlic shampoo, he’s going to continue to get injured and never be the player many Islander fans thought he’d be after 23 great games in 2002.

In other Islanders news, the team will get another injection of toughness as both Mitch Fritz and Tim Jackman. However, the question remains as to who sits if both of them or even one of them is in uniform on Thursday.

Cough:: Jeff Tambellini ::Cough.

Nothing against the kid, but he hasn’t shown a spark and considering how good Andy Hilbert and Richard Park have been thus far, he’s out of roles. This team doesn’t need another tiny sparkplug on the bottom two lines. They need another 20-goal scorer and as of right now, Tamby looks out of place.

Laviolette Canned? Well, it looks like former Islander coach Peter Laviolette will be spending the holiday season watching hockey at home, rather than coaching it with the Carolina Hurricanes. More ironic however is the fact that he has been replaced by Paul Maurice, the coach he replaced five years ago. As far as I’m concerned, Laviolette is still an excellent coach and if Alexei Yashin hadn’t played golf with Charles Wang every weekend, Lavy would have never lost control of his players and find the pink slip. And as far as that statement is concerned, I feel that while the Islanders teams he coached were good, they were never good enough to do more than he did with them.

Those teams really needed another legitimate scorer and a shutdown defenseman to compliment all the offense they had on the blue line. That is the real reason why Steve Stirling [who is now off coaching in Germany of all places] didn’t win a Stanley Cup here either. It had nothing to do with Laviolette. Sadly, just like the Islanders have had bad luck with players over the past 15 seasons, they’ve had just as much bad luck with coaches. Not keeping Laviolette and cleaning up the mess around him will always be one of them.

Posted under Isles Thoughts 2008