Does the Al Arbour Coached Game Count?





Of Course It Does!


A Good-Natured Enlightenment for Newsday writer, Jim Baumbach





The article came over the wire this afternoon. I looked at my window and saw the "BD" signal. I awaited my phone to ring. Instead I got the sound of James Brown to let me know I had some emails. Got to love a Blackberry. There I read that Newsday's Baumbach had launched a missile into the feel good vibrations that Islander fans had for once.

Baumbach wondered if the Al Arbour coached game should count.

Now, Jim, being Yankee beat writer in his former life had not quite understood that Islander fans sit begging for hockey coverage from his paper. Sure we have Greg Logan, our Islander beat writer always pounding the pavement to get us the best information. But we are usually relegated to the depths of Newsday despite our large online presence in their blogs and article comments online.

And perhaps Jim has not been paying attention to the calvacade of calamities that have befallen this local hockey team from his previous attentions to the ivory tower of Yankee hegemony. Islander fans know suffering. And on Saturday was a great exorcism to release those ghosts and pain, and the Islander collective breathed a giant "ahhhhhhhhhh!"

So imagine our sudden reaction as we still bask in the glory of one exceptional evening, as this article suddenly stares us in the face. He put a niftily-placed pin right where it hurts fans the most. Almost as sharp as one of Hank Steinbrenner's forks.

It is a valid question to ask: "should this count?". The problem is he offered his own opinion that it shouldn't. And to this leap of logic, let me please offer the following reason that not only that it should count, that Jim should have to go to an Isles game joining us in the blog box as punishment for being dead wrong. Well, not really punishment. We are a pretty good lot. We bloggers make tremendous sacrifices to our schedule and free time to make these efforts to blog the games. Sometimes doing 50-60 hour weeks, all to put times to our passions.

So, lets call it: Baumbach's Enlightenment. Where our sports writer must bask in our glow for a game due to the fact...well, he is wrong.

To answer the issue I will hearken to another great hockey coach: Roger Neilson. One of Neilson's great strengths was knowing what was missing in hockey rulebooks. Add that and his amazing innovations, many coaches now owe him a huge debt to this day. From the use of videotape to pressing upon loopholes in the muddy NHL rulebooks, Roger was a master.

Roger, in 2002, was allowed to coach the last two games of the season in Ottawa, allowing him to collect 999 and 1000. Both counted.

So once again, Roger innovated something in the NHL.

So, not only did the Isles plan it properly, it was well within the realm of NHL propriety. NHL might be missing the US audience these days, but I defy anyone to show me another league of ingrained tradition and honoring those who have come before. Sure, baseball, when it's convenient. And between HGH and steroid outbreaks. Football. Well, maybe when it's time for a record to be broken, and only the top guys. Basketball? Don't even let me get started.

Hockey has been more in touch with it's past than them all. Perhaps it's the distant 3rd or even 4th sport in this country, but this tough game lives and breathes itself, at times. In this sport, those who can, even well-past retirement, return for another run...whether it's short or not. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But it's always been par for the course. It's something that it an affixed element to this greatest game.

Ted Nolan made many allusions before this night that Al Arbour would indeed be doing his share. Perhaps more than Al perhaps thought he'd be doing when he first said yes. Sure Ted Nolan was on the bench, but just another man to be delegated as part of Al's coaching staff.

Ted said it himself after the game: The team willed itself a win. If you look deep to those words you can walk away in know on that night, in that special place and time, it was not Ted's team. It was Als. And perhaps Al might have not been intune to the everyday or intimately know the players but for that night, even at the threat of a divisional loss.

Al Arbour was coach, as for how much he really did, it is immaterial. And if it took a rule in the book that the former coach couldn't be there simultaneously, I think most Isles fans know that it still would likely have happened with the same result. To the usual sport fan who might have been not so attuned in hockey, it might be an apt question. But to those who live and breathe this game, it was right. To even Ranger fans, it was right. How do we know? It felt right in our bones. It was something even good for the soul.

In hockey, that's all we need.

And therein lies the very truth. That kernel of what matters.

Baumbach complains why can't the baseball heroes do that. Lasorda coming back to LA to get 1600. Or Carlton Fisk come back to get off of 2,499 games. Or even Red Schoendienst returning to get to 2,000.

But, Jim. It's not why hockey can, but about why those other sports can't.

Because they aren't hockey. Not much is.





Email: B.D. Gallof

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