MIKE Milbury is absolutely correct, the Islanders have stopped playing. Anyone can see that.
But maybe it isn’t Butch Goring whom the players quit on. Maybe it’s Milbury himself. Maybe it’s the GM, who gets to hide behind chaotic ownership in order to explain away a half-decade of unprecedented failure, but who refuses to give his coaches the same pardon he begs for every time he gets an audience with the newest rich guy without a clue to own the Islanders.
It was the night of Feb. 9 that CEO Charles Wang, who sure does seem to be enjoying his 15 minutes, announced for no particular cogent reason that he had made the decision to retain Milbury, who in a matter of weeks will have completed a fifth straight full season as GM without having made it to the playoffs even once. In the matter of survival, this is somewhat better than Kimmy or Sue or the fellow who burned his hands ever did, that’s for sure.
Since Wang made the announcement, the Islanders have played 11 games. They’ve gone 3-8, which is even worse than they had been doing prior to then, which everyone knows takes some doing. They’ve gone 3-8 with Wang having felt compelled to issue a follow-up speech to ticket-holders in which he suggested that fans who didn’t agree with his decision to retain Milbury should get a life, stop bothering him and stay home rather than come to the Coliseum to vent their displeasure.
Maybe that’s why on Saturday night during a 6-0 loss to Tampa Bay that was worse than anything Germain Gagnon, Brian Lavender or Gerry Desjardins ever inflicted upon the franchise, even Howie Rose was moved to remark on TV to Joe Michelletti that the crowd hadn’t really ever gotten angry. Of course not; the angry fans, the ones whose hearts have been torn out, the ones who somehow still care, are taking the new owner’s sage advice. The angry fans are staying away.
Or maybe it wasn’t the Feb. 9 announcement that provided the incentive for an Islander team that has shown over the last few years it doesn’t need much incentive to quit no matter who’s behind the bench. Maybe the incentive for this year’s pathetic crew – one that has taken full advantage of the cloud cover under which the Islanders operate – came on Dec. 10, when Milbury gathered his team at the Coliseum locker room for a motivational talk.
This was the one where, after pretty much impugning the manhood of his players, Milbury turned his attention to Goring and all but cut the legs out from under him by informing everyone in the room that, “If they don’t start to win games, you’re out of here!” Some people who have talked to me about that meeting have said that Milbury’s conduct toward Goring was as bad as they’d ever seen, that it had made everyone uncomfortable. One man told me, plain and simple, “Butch was humiliated.”
Even Wang, as it turns out, thought that Milbury had gone too far. Milbury, we were told, was called in by Wang two days later and informed that his approach probably wasn’t the best way to treat or motivate people, even a coach about to be scapegoated. I guess not, as at the time of the meeting the Islanders were 8-14-4-2, and since then they’ve gone 9-26-1-1.
Milbury talks about the team losing its focus on hockey rather than his team quitting on the coach because now, now that he’s fired Goring, he doesn’t want to say anything negative about him. The truth is, if the team quit on Goring, it did so weeks after the GM already done so, after he had done so semi-privately in that room on Dec. 10, after he had done so privately in his board-room meetings with Wang.
It could not have been clearer when, after publicly thanking Wang for removing doubt about his future, Milbury refused to do so the same for Goring. If a Butch of earlier days, Butch Cassidy, had had Milbury in the guise of the Sundance Kid, he’d have been shot in the back by his partner.
Milbury talks about how his work on the Island has been sabotaged by the budgets imposed on him by absentee, felonious and greed-driven ownerships. To a point, he’s obviously correct. But he passed that point a long time ago, about when the Roberto Luongo Era was about to dawn.
It is now more accurate to observe that Milbury has retained his job only because of the incompetence and disinterest of these ownership groups; to suggest that Milbury retains his job now not because Wang thinks he’s the right man for the post, but because Wang doesn’t want to pay off whatever exactly he has remaining on the six-year, $4.8 million deal the GM somehow wrangled from the remarkably destructive Milstein-Gluckstern-Seldin Swine Line.
Since Milbury has been GM, in addition to himself having been head coach twice, he has fired Rick Bowness, Bill Stewart and now Goring.
This is one captain who does not believe in going down with the ship.
