Organizational Changes and Prospect Camp

Hello all! I know its been a couple of days since our last post, but there has indeed been a lot of noise coming out of Islanders Country over the past week. Off-season? What off-season?

As many of you probably already know, the Islanders announced that they are not renewing the contract of Assistant General Manager and Director of Amateur Scouting Ryan Jankowski, and are also finding a new position in the organization for Bryan Trottier, who was the Executive Director of Player Development.

Both these moves have come as a little bit of a shock to the fanbase, since Jankowski is responsible for a number of the Islanders draft picks since 2007. With the team rebuilding, solid drafting is important and Jankowski was the huge reason for the recent success the Isles have had in that department. With the team close to being done with the rebuild and looking to make the next step, perhaps they realized that it was a good time to make the change. Kati Strang of Newsday reported that the move was not money related, and we will probably never learn the reason. At any rate, we obviously thank Jankowski for his services and the great players he has helped bring into the organization. If he stays in the NHL, someone is going to get one heck of a hockey mind.

What concerns me the most here is that Garth Snow will be taking on Jankowski's responsibilities moving forward. I like Snow a lot, and think that he is a good GM. But that is a little too much work for one man to handle. It's hard enough to keep track of the inner workings of your NHL team, but to have to look out for an AHL team in Connecticut and keep an eye on scouting, well that's a lot to have on your plate. Here's hoping Snow can manage it.

Trottier worked with a lot of the Isles younger players, often going to Bridgeport and was seen taking notes and sometimes standing on the bench during games. Josh Bailey in the past talked about how much of an influence Trottier had on helping him with his game. It seems that the Islanders don't have plans to replace this position either, but it is good that they plan to keep a guy like Trottier in the organization. The Islanders of the past such as Trottier and Eric Cairns seem to have some influence on the young players as each one has talked glowingly about them in the past. We of course wish Trotts the best in his new endeavor for the team, whatever that may be.

While some have a bitter taste in their mouth from these two moves and feel that the team is in fact cutting costs, organizational changes are not uncommon, This week the Vancouver Canucks are going through their own major changes, it has been reported. We'll see what those are as we move along.

The Islanders prospect camp began this week, and we finally get to see what we have in Kirill Petrov, Nino Niederreiter and Kirill Kabanov among others. Petrov made the biggest impression in the fist days of camp it seems. I'm excited to see what the Blue and Orange scrimmage gives us. Many expect that Petrov could be coming over the the team this year, and I feel that is going to be based on how great he does here at this camp. The Islanders would then have to negotiate a contract with Petrov and a buyout from his contractual ties in Russia. He has expressed interest in coming over the North America this year, so we'll see how this goes. You can check back for reports and links to the Islanders prospect camp as we'll hopefully have some good information available later.

-Chris

nyifyi@gmail.com