Islanders must battle their way out of nosedive
The Islanders' Bruno Gervais, left, joked that the team's losing streak has gotten so bad "we thought about bringing in a goat and sacrificing a goat." (Nov. 6, 2010) Credit: Jim McIsaac
A seven-game losing streak may not exactly be fodder for Thomas Paine - "These are the times that try men's souls" - but it certainly has the Islanders casting around for a possible solution. "I mean," defenseman Bruno Gervais said, "we thought about bringing in a goat and sacrificing a goat."
Of course he merely was lightening the mood. But the team's three-game West Coast swing, beginning Wednesday in Anaheim, has the Islanders (4-8-2) considering how to shake their recent funk.
"You come to the rink, work harder and have a good attitude," captain Doug Weight said, "and know that no one in this league, or outside this room, cares about you. You have to come together, come with some emotion to practice and just try to get out of it."
Coach Scott Gordon had his charges concentrate on crashing the net during yesterday's training session, drilling down to the basics. "It's not like we have a guy who scores from the perimeter," Gordon said. "We have guys who are good around the net, and if we don't get there, we're not good around the net."
A failure to "compete" and "battle" are what concerned Gordon in bad losses in Philadelphia and Carolina last week, so to Gordon, putting the kibosh on the seven-game drought "is not about motivational speeches. It's about our play away from the puck, our play on the puck. When your positioning is good but you don't have that fight and battle in your game, it doesn't matter how good your positioning is."
Gordon's players remember the good feelings from a 4-1-2 start, so that "we talk about getting the swagger back," Gervais said. "But you know what they say - that hockey is 40 percent physical and 80 percent mental." While the department of higher math works on that, Gervais acknowledged that "mentally, it's hard to get one individual to build his confidence back" during a rough patch, "so imagine a whole team."
To Weight, a 20-year NHL veteran, "you've just got to challenge each other to come to the rink in a good mood, prepare emotionally, work hard. We've seen enough stuff on video. We know what we have to do. We have to go out and perform; that's what it comes down to."
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