Survivor: Long Island
Thursday, July 20, 2006

Posted by Kerrzy

Trottier, Lafontaine, Snow, Nolan, Smith; who will outlast the others this week on Survivor: Long Island… Well, for at least a day or two it looks as though Edmonton won’t be the ONLY place that NHL personnel appear to be fleeing from. The league’s newest general manager, Neil Smith of the New York Islanders, is now the league’s first new GM to be fired, as just a month and a bit into his return to the GM desk, Isles owner Charles Wang lay the hammer down.

Smith apparently had ‘philosophical opposition’ to the team’s business model.

Garth Snow immediately got the nod for the suddenly vacant general manager position. After the news conference, the new senior advisor to the owner, Pat Lafontaine handed his letter of resignation to Wang.

That leaves Trottier, Snow and Nolan.

As Don Cherry notes every time Ted Nolan’s name comes up, Ted Nolan outlasts a lot of GM’s when he is the head coach, and that is why general managers were scared to hire him…well here’s another notch in that belt.

Could Nolan have had something to do with Smith’s “difficulty working within the team's revamped front office” that Smith told Wang he was having? Perhaps.

According to Eklund at www.hockeybuzz.com, Smith is “very upset” and is apparently considering legal action as his contract may have not even been signed yet.

Trouble in the front office doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot to the on-ice product though, and that’s where we check in with the Edmonton Oilers, who have lost Chris Pronger, Mike Peca, Sergei Samsonov, Jaroslav Spacek, and less importantly, Georges Laraque, Ty Conklin and Radek Dvorak.

The only big name from last year that the Oil have managed to hold on to is Dwayne Roloson – Roloson had a huge playoff run, don’t get me wrong…but this is a goalie who, in eight NHL seasons, has never hit the 30-win plateau.

Without that injury in the Stanley Cup finals, I believed that with Roloson in net, the Oilers could win the series in five or six games, because he had such a strong playoff run. The knock on Roloson though, is that his whole career has been a fight against consistency, and his statistics seem to tell that story.

With that in mind, I’m sorry to say that I cannot believe Roloson is Edmonton’s biggest signing (and currently their highest paid player), as the first month of free-agency comes to a close; but I hope he can prove me wrong.

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Jim Kerr