Islanders need wins to change ice follies

Zenon Konopka has plenty of friends around the NHL, around his native Ontario and around the hockey world in general who view this latest bit of Islanders "drama," as Konopka put it, as just the latest example of the minor-league operation the Islanders run.

Those friends have wondered to Konopka why on earth his team would claim Evgeni Nabokov on waivers. They side with the suspended goaltender in his desire to not come to Long Island and play for a bottom-rung team.

"I've had to set plenty of them straight, even today," he said. "You just try to make them see both sides of it. Make them go, 'Oh, OK, I get it now, he should definitely be there, playing with you guys.'

"Part of our job with this team is rebuild the legacy of this franchise. It's going to take some time, obviously, and we're still a ways away. But you've got to take those first few steps."

Konopka and his teammates could use the four-day All-Star break that begins today. The first four months of this NHL season have featured plenty of drama surrounding the Islanders, little of it on the ice, unless you count the 1-17-3 skid in November and December that cost Scott Gordon his job and made Konopka and his teammates lonely defenders of the Isles faith.

The attendance is down, just a shade over 10,000 a game - last night's umpteenth snowstorm didn't help matters with another painfully sparse crowd at the Coliseum. Garth Snow's slow rebuild became slower when Mark Streit and Kyle Okposo suffered training-camp shoulder injuries; the Isles do lead the league in something, but unfortunately it's man-games lost to injury.

There was the unusually grand attention paid to the team's decision to bar blogger and former team PR executive Chris Botta from games. Josh Bailey's three-week demotion. And now, Nabokov decides not to come, after a bizarre round of phone tag that had owner Charles Wang telling reporters that Nabokov had hung up on Snow.

Through it all - and this is even without mentioning Wang's quest for a new arena by 2015, either here or elsewhere - it's the players who have to try and navigate through a hockey environment in which they seem to be pitied, laughed at or forgotten.

"It's not frustrating to me. I just know that people outside here don't know what they're talking about," Okposo said. "People that say that stuff haven't been here. You talk to Z [Konopka], PA [Parenteau], even Wiz [James Wisniewski] when he was here - there's a perception that this is a bad place to play, and it's not true. Not to us."

Okposo knows there's only one way to change that perception: Win a few more games over the final 33 after the All-Star break and, coupled with what's likely to be another top-5 draft pick, start the process all over again in September.

"We just need to win. It's something we've got to learn how to do here to build for the future," he said.

"The future" - those have become dirty words to Islanders fans who have grown impatient. Their absence, noted in this space and elsewhere, has contributed to the drama surrounding this team through 49 games.

A few days away will not change much in the standings, or in the stands. But perhaps a drama-free final two months can be the first step back to respectability for this Islanders team, which has had four months of soap-opera level calamity.