Free agency

Loving all the comments — disaster riles the blood, don’t it? — but there are a couple of ideas floating around that have me kind of curious.

The Islanders wait until the end of the summer to fill out the roster. You can make that argument over the long haul, but it becomes dicey, because this is probably the season that least supports it.

Lots of dates follow, just ’cause I looked ’em up, so skip toward the bottom if you’re bored:

Just going back through the blog last summer: Brennan, Jackman and Spiller were signed by July 3. (So was Morency, to a lower-level deal.) MacDonald and Bootland (ah, Darryl) were signed by July 5. Aaron Johnson, by July 12 (and yes, that was considered a top-pair-Bridgeport/depth-N.Y. signing at the time, but they wouldn’t risk waivers on him after a good training camp… and then other things happened). If Haskins and Bourne and some of those other AHL/ECHL kids weren’t locked up by rookie camp in early July, that came soon after. And their backup goalie, of course, was done by July 12, too: Maxime Ouellet. (Oh.)

Now, NHL.com pushes these things into the public sphere more quickly than in the past, when we were mostly at the mercy of the PR departments (who were at the mercy of the hockey ops departments), but to compare, all of these guys were signed earlier than Letang and Manlow and Brandon Smith were announced in July 2002 (no earlier than July 15 on the first two, July 31 on the last). Jeff Hamilton was Aug. 8 (he’s bigger in hindsight, obviously), and Nasreddine wasn’t announced that year until just before camp. In 2001, Tuomainen was announced in mid-July, and Armstrong, Roche and Podollan were all announced in early-to-mid August. The only NHL free agent this summer who arrived later than July was Morrison, who won a job on a tryout. Other than him, on the opening-night roster, the only other pieces who weren’t in place by July were Labelle and Gregg Johnson (also camp successes, though Johnson had an AHL deal) and Walter (traded Sept. 11).

To compare to other years, Ryan Kraft was announced July 7, 2003; Dieter Kochan was rumored to have been done soon after but was finally finalized in August. Rob Collins and some others weren’t announced until very late in the summer, but the rumor was that many of them were done earlier. ’04-05 was delayed to August by the financial and ownership situation, though they had tried hard to retain Letang. The lockout pushed everyone back a month in ’05-06: Wyatt Smith was announced Aug. 10; Allan Rourke, Aug. 12; Joel Bouchard, Aug. 18-19 (depending on your online source; I don’t have my writeup); Chris Madden, Aug. 24. Most of the big 2006 stuff was announced just after the Neil Smith/Garth Snow transition, IIRC, because I think the releases kept coming while I was in Chicago, so after July 18. Peter Ferraro, then, was Aug. 28.

Things were better with an independent ownership. But the Islanders handled player personnel then, too. “Things were better with Gordie Clark” may get closer to the point.

And the whole Dwyer thing still has me scratching my head.

Monday is planned as an off day; wasting my arithmetics* on the tax code. Keep having at it…

*-You know why four plus minus-one plus 10 is 14 minus one?

Michael Fornabaio