New York Islanders: Is This Garth Snow's Final Stand?

How the New York Islanders finish this season could determine the fate of General Manager Garth Snow.

It’s hard to evaluate and rank NHL general managers. Some are playing with a much better hand than others. A few fall into really good situations that they had at best minimal control over. Most, however, are enigmas. They do both good and bad things. Perhaps no general manager is a better example of this than New York Islanders GM Garth Snow.

Last season, the Isles fired head coach Jack Capuano after a slow start. After 43 games, they had 44 points. This season, the Islanders are only two points ahead of this pace with 46 points in 43 games. Snow doesn’t have a scapegoat this time around. Not when head coach Doug Weight nearly got the previously underachieving Islanders to the postseason.

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The Islanders ownership group changed a bit in 2016. Jon Ledecky and Scott D. Malkin became majority shareholders, finally getting to make the decisions Charles Wang failed at for so long. They made the controversial decision to hang onto Snow despite the Islanders only making the postseason four times in his first 11 seasons as general manager.

Last Stand

Should the Isles freefall continue, it’s going to be hard for Snow to blame anyone but himself. His moves in the 2017 offseason were baffling. Sure, the Jordan Eberle for Ryan Strome trade was fantastic. A huge win, even. And even though it was in 2015, Snow should be applauded for managing to get Mathew Barzal and Anthony Beauvillier for a spare defenseman in Griffin Reinhart.

On the other hand, nothing about the Travis Hamonic trade makes sense. Why trade him for only draft picks? Especially if you’re not a rebuilding team? If you’re not going to rebuild, at least use the draft picks to get someone who can make an immediate impact. Even if you want to use the salary cap argument, had Snow not signed guys like Cal Clutterbuck, Casey Cizikas, Nikolay Kulemin, and Johnny Boychuk to long-term deals, the Islanders could have kept Hamonic.

Snow deserves every ounce of criticism for his team’s struggles. He either knew the blue line was going to have issues or he should have known this would be the case. And yet Snow hasn’t done a thing to address it yet, outside of sign Scott Mayfield to a head-scratching long-term extension.

It’s Complicated

Should the Isles miss the playoffs again, their postseason “batting average” with Garth will be .333. If this was baseball, that’d be fantastic. But this is the NHL, a league in which just over half of the teams (16 out of 31) make the postseason. And with the Vegas Golden Knights having early success, this proves how remarkably easy it is to turn a team around and compete.

So the easy solution is to fire Snow if the Islanders miss the playoffs, right? In an ideal world, it would be this simple. But this isn’t one. There are other factors. The largest one is Snow’s contract, which has no fewer than four more years remaining on it. And it’s one the current ownership group had absolutely nothing to do with.

Firing Snow would force the new ownership group to pay a very large amount of money. Keep in mind the Islanders also need to re-sign captain John Tavares. Even if he takes a hometown discount, it’s hard to see him signing for anything less than $10 million per season. There’s also the move to Belmont. So paying Snow a ton of money to not do anything is way more complicated than it sounds.

Wang did a lot of bad things for the Islanders. He took a team that had been fighting to go back to their early 1980’s glory days and sapped what remaining decency the Isles had left. Wang allowed Mike Milbury to be in charge of making front office decisions.

Even if this was the only bad thing he did, that’s bad enough. But Wang’s parting present of a long-term contract for Snow might wind up costing the Islanders their best chance of being a Stanley Cup contender.

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If the Islanders don’t extend Tavares, that’s likely a dealbreaker. But what else would justify an ownership group eating Snow’s expensive contract when they just purchased majority shares less than 24 months ago? That’s the Catch-22 the Islanders must answer.

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