Orange wins Prospect Game 5-4; Islanders Rumors

Team Orange won the prospect game on Saturday night 5-4. The teams played had a skills competition after the game as well. There were some Islanders that stood out, and that is good considering some of them are very close to making contributions to the team.

One of the noticeable ones was Matt Martin, who has seemed to work on his skating a little bit. There were already hopes that Martin would fill the job of being the ultimate enforcer/pest while putting up a decent amount of points, and from we saw in his brief stint last year left us wanting more. Great to see Martin continue to work on his game.

Goalie Mikko Koskinen looked very strong, which is encouraging when you take into the consideration that he had to batter through a major hip injury last season. His reactions were generally quick, and he didn't look too awkward on his skates. This kid is big. He'll put on some more muscle too. One would assume that he will be the starter in Bridgeport this season.

Many fans walked away pretty satisfied with Nino Niederreiter. We finally got a see a little bit of what we had in him, and he is big. The scary thought with him is that he is only going to fill out more being that he is so young, and his style of play could make him quite the force on the left side for the team for a long while. He also showed us he is quite good with handling the puck.

Unfortunately, we did not get to see Kirill Petrov in this game. He has suffered a shoulder injury, and is going to be evaluated by team doctors on Monday. Lets hope for the best as he seems like a strong possibility to make the team this year.

The Islanders have some nice coverage of their prospect game, complete with a slew of photos here.

IslandersTV had coverage of the game, with a ton of different guests on such as Calvin deHaan, John Tavares and Garth Snow. Snow was a very interesting interview, as he talked about some NHL moves. He touched upon Kovalchuk again, not ruling the Islanders out but saying that they are "still monitoring that situation" and will "see where that takes us." Interesting. He also stated that he would not rule out trading for another defenseman at some point in the summer. There are some decent defensemen available through trade, and they would be a definite upgrade to our blueline for the upcoming season. We'll see what happens there.

Of course, everyone seems to be excited that we could still be in on Kovalchuk. I still remain skeptical, but it certainly would be nice. The Islanders seem to have been looking at scoring, and there is still some sitting out there. As we get later into the summer, there seems to be a good chance that the Islanders could land a good player at a great price. There were rumors tonight that Kovalchuk was flying to Los Angeles to sign a contract with the Kings, however the Kings have disputed the rumor and said that they are meeting face-to-face with him just as they would with any free agent. So we'll have to see what happens, and again I'm skeptical. But it is certainly nice to see that Snow is quite serious about going after the top talents available.

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-Chris