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Snow forecast, lets hope Islanders aren't buried

Wallace Matthews

July 15, 2008

On Friday, Garth Snow will celebrate either 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 yesterday that he officially got the job. Now, after two years, we finally may learn if he is up to it.

The firing of Ted Nolan yesterday, a mercy killing if ever there was one, signals the beginning of the Garth Snow era and the end, if Snow is to be believed, of the hockey-by-committee that the Islanders have practiced - and failed dismally at - in the past 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. Nor have empty seats at the dreadful Nassau Mausoleum, nor (presumably) hemorrhaging money.

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In his own special way, Wang is 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 yesterday. "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 honors and losing his job with the Buffalo Sabres in the same season, a rare daily double not duplicated until Joe Girardi accomplished it with the Florida Marlins in 2006.

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 Charles 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, architect of the 1994 Stanley Cup champion Rangers, 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."

And why not? Everyone was in charge, which of course meant no one was in charge.

Smith somehow was 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. Like the foil in an old Abbott & Costello routine, it didn't take Smith long to find out he was boss of nothing.

Snow 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 won'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.

If you're an Islanders fan, you have to hope it's the former. He's had the title for nearly two years now. Finally, we'll get to see if he can actually do the job.