The Islanders return to the ice tonight as they square off with the New Jersey Devils at the Prudential Center in New Jersey. In typical MSG manner, this game features two teams that appear on their network but since one of them is not the Rangers there is no broadcast of the game. There is also no internet feed of the game either. I have 15 years of television experience and I can tell you it is far more cost efficient to broadcast this game tonight than it was for MSG to broadcast a preseason game from Philadelphia this past Tuesday. The priorities of MSG Network are nothing new, just frustrating to say the least.

With the Islanders playing tonight and then tomorrow in Bridgeport, the roster, tonight, resembles a split squad lineup. Jaroslav Halak will be in net tonight and he's expected to play the entire night. Here is the projected lines and defensive pairings for tonight’s game.

Josh Bailey-Alan Quine-Colin McDonald
Anders Lee-Frans Nielsen-Ryan Strome
Cory Conacher- Mikhail Grabovski-Nikolai Kulemin
Eric Boulton-Kael Mouillierat -Mike Halmo

Thomas Hickey-Travis Hamonic
Griffin Reinhart-Brian Strait
Aaron Ness-Scotty Mayfield

Jaroslav Halak-Kevin Poulin

It will interesting to see how Lee and Strome play with Nielsen, tonight, as both kids are pushing to make the opening night roster. Tonight will be a great opportunity for the pair of Islanders’ prospects to separate themselves and show they belong with the team that will faceoff with the Hurricanes a week from tomorrow. The line of Conacher, Grabo, and Kulemin should bring a ton of speed to the game tonight and if Conacher continues to impress, he could lock up a roster spot.

On defense, Islander prospect Griffin Reinhart continues to get a good long look from the Islander brass. He was solid and steady Tuesday night in Boston and more strong play from the 2012 first rounder could land him on the opening night roster. I would expect Ryan Pulock would be in tomorrow night’s lineup and depending on the health of Calvin de Haan and Lubomir Visnovsky you could see both first round picks make their NHL debut next week. I’m more than skeptical to start two rookies in my top six but as someone posted yesterday, could the defense really get any worse than it was last year?

I do not see any trades on the near horizon so this log jam of players has to be worked out over the next week. One thing is for certain, I do not see anything drastic happening with Josh Bailey. Bailey is not getting bought out or waived. In my opinion, that would be an admission of fault from Islanders’ General Manager Garth Snow. We can only hope that whatever role Bailey plays in the team’s bottom six forwards, he can play that role effectively. It is becoming clearer that Bailey will be blocking the spot of one of the Islanders’ prospects.

The bottom line with this roster is that we all want the 23 best players on this team come next Friday. Regardless of what the lineup looks like there will be hours of debate lauding over it. I do not expect a miracle trade to free up room up front so we are going to get what we get next Friday and hope it is good enough to rack up points once the regular season kicks off. As always, for more on all things hockey please follow me on Twitter at @DanDanNoodles78.

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