Polishing the Turd

We're all too familiar with the epic collapses and shootout fails that have brought the Islanders to their current position in the cellar of the Atlantic with a 1-4-5 record. I won't insult anyone's intelligence and pretend that we should be anything but borderline miserable at this point. But the purpose of this post is to try to put a positive spin on things. Play a little "what-if" to put things in a slightly different perspective.

First and foremost, we need to remember, it's VERY early in the season. As Chris(topher) Botta recently pointed out (sarcastically?), the Isles are only 4 points out of a playoff spot. To put that in a language you can understand, we are a mere 4 OT losses from the playoffs! But seriously, it's so early in the season that we can have but one regulation win and still be only 4 points out of the 8-spot. If this were March and we were 4 points out of a playoff spot, we'd be ecstatic. In October/November, a good week or two can catapult you from the basement to a home-ice-in-the-first-round slot. Again, the point is it's very early and there's plenty of time to get it going.

But that begs the question - does this team have the ability to string together some wins? I think the answer is yes, and we only need to look at the last 10 games to support that. 3 of their 4 regulation losses were by 3+ goals and they were badly outplayed in each. So there's no rewriting history on those. Their only other regulation loss (against LA) was a 1-goal game, but every team is going to have a bunch of those during the course of a season. So we'll ignore that as well. It's in the 5 OT losses that, a different bounce here or there, could change the whole complexion of the season.

Let's pretend the collapse in Boston never happened. Then let's assume of the remaining 4 games we lost in OT or shootout, we split instead. Here's our record:

4-4-2, 10 points

We'd be in the #10 spot, one point behind Boston and Philadelphia for a playoff spot. I don't think there would be one fan in Islanders country that would be complaining. Sure, we are cursed and all those bad things DID happen. But it really isn't too far fetched to imagine a scenario where we are sitting with a .500 record and 10 pts at this stage of the game.

I feel like this team is capable of .500 hockey this season. A win tonight and we are only 2 games under with a gazillion left to play. I'm not saying it will happen. But it can.

Now, back to reality...

MC