Barring what would be a fantastic Final, this is the last trip the Hawks will ever make to the Nassau Coliseum. Here's what I said about this last year:
Curious Hair wrote:
Hawks are at home, and so maybe this should wait until their return engagement, but fuck, I might forget it. The clock is running out on the good old Nassau Coliseum, and this makes me sad. I have a soft spot for the Islanders and a weird fascination with Long Island as a cultural entity. It's a monster of a book, but I feel that The Power Broker is one of the most important pieces of American writing and necessary in understanding why our country, particularly our suburbia, looks the way it does today (namely, that Long Island's roads were designed by a man who didn't drive). In an ironic twist, I logged my hours and hours of reading it on Amtrak trips. As for the team itself, there's a tragic beauty to the way they were built from the ground up out of nothing but a desire to cockblock the WHA, and then won four straight championships before fading away and spiraling into year after year after year after year of abject humiliation. Take your pick: no series wins since 1993, the fisherman sweater, selling the team to a guy who lied about having money and went to prison for it, the Alexei Yashin buyout, the Rick DiPietro buyout, the Rick DiPietro career. But they still have their four straight Cups, and they'll tell everyone about those glory days every single chance they get as they sit and fail in their dying suburban wasteland. They're Al Bundy.
I always thought it was neat that Long Island had its own team, and now, even though the Barclays Center sits on top of a LIRR terminal, they're going to be a Brooklyn team, engaging in the same bald-faced pandering to the precious little shits that populate that borough nowadays. They're even doing all their advertising in stark black/white and the Nets' signature typeface. They've already played a preseason game in Brooklyn, and it's horrible. Due to cost-cutting, the Nets' architects had to design the seating bowl to be basketball-only, even though they knew the Isles were probably coming in anyway. The end result is that you have people in the upper deck who can't see past their own blue line, corners at angles that make no sense, and a sea of empty space behind the home goalie's net. Meanwhile, Nassau, for all its faults (leaking roof, asbestos), was designed for hockey and pretty much hockey only, with basketball, concert acoustics, and corporate blowjob suites hardly taken into consideration. It's a relic of a grittier, grimier NHL that hadn't yet gotten around to worshiping at the altar of big business. And yet the terrible reality is that while no one can actually see the game they're paying to see, the luxury suites are expected to increase the Isles' revenue geometrically.
So it sucks that they're going into such a paradoxically good and bad situation just as they're on the cusp of doing something really special with the pieces they've put together. I guess imagine if Wirtz died and so the Blackhawks somehow started playing their games at Loyola's fieldhouse. They're good hockey fans out on the isle, and it's about time they get to see a decent team again. (True, they had those Yashin & Friends teams in the early '00s that were designed to finish eighth, collect playoff revenue, and go away quietly, but no one cares about that.)
We've learned since then that the arena management is paying the Islanders $50MM/year to play in Brooklyn, but someone must have told the arena this is completely fucking pants-on-head retarded, so there's an out clause after five years. Nassau County might get these guys back after all.
So since last year's first of two, the Isles really fucked it all up and then put it back together. Garth Snow crapped the bed on the Vanek trade, but the fact that he gave up his first in a loaded draft made him make sure that Buffalo got that pick outside of lottery range. It's like they always say: never corner a wild animal, or a career backup goaltender who was inexplicably promoted to general manager with no front-office experience.
The Isles are in a two-horse race with Pittsburgh for the divisional championship, but in a division as shitty as theirs, there might be more benefit to finishing second and taking your chances with whichever of Washington or New York derps their way into third place than finishing first and playing the fourth or fifth team in the much more competitive Atlantic. And as a team that scores a lot and gives up almost as many, they're a textbook second-place-in-a-bad-division team, you've gotta believe.
After having gone on some unholy tear, we're catching the Islanders at about the best time to catch them: Johnny Boychuk is out at D, as is Travis Hamonic. Boychuk and our pal Nick Leddy were Snow's two big acquisitions in the preseason, both cap casualties of their respective teams, now greatly helping to start the offense -- or in Boychuk's case, finish it with a deadly slapshot. I think Lubomir Visnovsky is also out for them, but he's old and bad.
Jaroslav Halak is likely in net, who has been bad or injured lately: the Isles have blown two three-goal leads this week and just gave up six to St. Louis the other night. Bad. Still, the Isles have so many dazzling weapons. John Tavares is among the league's best (12 and 14), Frans Nielsen (6 and 11) and Kyle Okposo (6 and 20) are dangerous, this Andres Lee kid is on a tear, and Brock Nelson (13 and 11) has been racking up points as well. Nelson's a guy the Isles drafted with our first-round pick in 2010. We traded up to draft Kevin Hayes. Oops.
Stay out of the box and especially stay out of the shootout. Enjoy the Daniel Bryan YES! chants and the weird camera angles from this weird old dump.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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