There are many veteran hockey people whose commentaries should be taken seriously. Even if one disagrees with a particular opinion, their credentials as authoritative sources at least merit respectful consideration. Mike Milbury is not one of those people.
Sometimes I think there should be a laugh track inserted when the former NHL player, head coach and general manager gives his hot takes on NBCSN and NBC. Milbury has never been one to apply logic or research to back up his opinions. He just substitutes bluster.
Milbury's perpetually negative comments on the abilities of Flyers goaltender Steve Mason, most recently calling him a "run-of-the-mill" NHL goaltender are par for the course. It is little more than the notoriously stubborn Milbury refusing to admit that he was wrong about a player. The notion that he's not the smartest person in the room is abhorrent to him, so he digs in his heels.
In lieu of Milbury actually doing some research and finding out that Mason has consistently been an above-average goaltender since his arrival in Philadelphia late in the 2013 lockout-shortened season -- and has been far above-average this season -- let's review Milbury's track record of expertise in making hockey talent evaluations. It's nothing short of staggering.
During his tenure as New York Islanders general manager, Milbury summarily ran right into the ground an organization that, at various times, had the pieces to develop into an elite team. Here are the biggest "highlights" of an 11-year regime that was chronically marked by putting faith in the wrong players, overpaying in trades and giving up way too soon on young players after failing to properly develop them:
• In one of the most lopsided trades in modern-NHL history, Milbury traded Roberto Luongo (at age 21) and Olli Jokinen (also 21) to the Florida Panthers for Mark Parrish and Oleg Kvasha. The Islanders then used the first overall pick of the 2000 NHL Draft to select goalie Rick DiPietro, bypassing a host of position players -- not the least of whom was Marian Gaborik -- who went on have strong NHL careers.
In fairness, DiPietro's career was derailed by injuries. However, Milbury's
public assertion that "in the end, we thought the quality DiPietro will bring is just a notch above Luongo" is laughable in hindsight. Even at DiPietro's best when he seemed to be blossoming into a legitimate star, he was still never Luongo's equal.
• Preceding this sequence of moves was the Zigmund Palffy saga. Palffy tallied 43-plus goals and 87-plus points three straight years for the Islanders but Milbury and Palffy's agent, Paul Kraus, hated one another. The contract squabbles got worse and worse, to the point where there was no choice but to trade the player.
Milbury traded Palffy to the LA Kings as the main piece of a deal for Jokinen (whom LA drafted with their 1997 first-round pick), Josh Green, defenseman prospect Mathieu Biron (a 1998 first-round pick by LA) and the eighth overall selection of the 1999 NHL draft (Taylor Pyatt). While the Islanders acquired a lot of assets and prospects, the assets got mismanaged or didn't pan out as NHL impact players. Palffy, meanwhile, produced three seasons of 32 to 38 goals and two seasons of 85-plus points while in LA.
On the bright side, the Islanders were able to unload Bryan Smolinski's inflated contract -- another Milbury blunder -- to the Kings. Previously, while Smolinski was unsigned in Pittsburgh, Milbury traded defenseman Darius Kasparaitis and rookie Andreas Johansson to the Penguins for Smolinski's negotiating rights. The Isles then signed the forward to a contract that, after a very good first season with the Islanders, soon started to exceed his production.
However, when Smolinski got to LA, he had solid seasons his first two years. Smolinski had seasons of 20 and 27 goals and 56 and 59 points in 1999-2000 and 2001-02. That's closer to what the Islanders had been hoping to get from him.
• In arguably the single-worst sequence of major moves in modern NHL history, Milbury massively overpaid in trade for then-star Alexei Yashin. Later, the Islanders signed Yashin to an ill-fated 10-year, $90 million contract. After Yashin was bought out in 2007, the Isles were still on the hook to send him very large checks for twice the remaining length of the contract. Yashin collected his final payment this season.
Meanwhile, the trade return that the Islanders sent to the Ottawa Senators consisted of young defenseman Zdeno Chara, a 2001 first-round pick (the Senators chose Jason Spezza with the second overall pick), and Bill Muckalt.
In summary, Milbury traded away a future perpetual Norris Trophy contender on defense in his formative years (the Islanders got only the "learning curve struggle years" while the Senators and Bruins reaped the rewards of the finished product) plus a high-end pick that was converted into a star forward in order to get Yashin.
• Milbury acquired Trevor Linden -- an iconic player in Vancouver but starting the downward slide of his career -- from the Canucks for young power forward Todd Bertuzzi, defenseman Bryan McCabe and and a 1998 3rd-round draft pick (Jarko Ruutu).
• Milbury traded former Calder Trophy winner Bryan Berard to Toronto midway through the 1998-99 season for goaltender Felix Potvin and a swap of six-round draft picks. Berard, who had just produced a 14-goal, 46-point campaign in his second full NHL season, was always much better with the puck than without. He was strictly an offensive defenseman, but an excellent one.
Potvin, meanwhile, was still largely living off the reputation built in a stellar 1993 playoff run with the Maple Leafs. The goaltender flopped in Long Island. Berard's career was skyrocketing until a very serious eye injury. Even upon his eventual return, he remained a productive point-producer.
• In the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars at an arbitration hearing with starting goaltender Tommy Salo, Milbury assailed not only the goaltender's performance for the Islanders but his character as a hockey player to the point that Salo was reduced to tears.
Milbury then traded Salo to the Edmonton Oilers for then-prospect Mats Lindgren and a 1999 8th-round draft pick. Salo went on to have a solid career in Edmonton. Lindgren did not pan out. However, the Islanders scouts scored a late-round "hit" in the selection of Radek Martinek. Milbury deserves no credit for that bit of good fortune, as he had done none of the legwork or evaluation of the player.
• The Islanders drafted forward J.P. Dumont with the third overall pick of the 1996 NHL Draft but the player never suited up for the team. Milbury traded Dumont and a 1998 5th-round pick for young center Dmitri Nabokov (the Blackhawks' 1995 first-round selection).
Dumont went on to be a perennial 20-to-29 goal scorer and produced 65 to 72 points three times in an NHL career spanning 822 regular season games and 51 playoff matches. Nabokov played in 55 NHL games (11 goals, 24 points) and just 30 for the Islanders. A frequent target for criticism, Nabokov was dispatched to the AHL and returned to Russia permanently at age 23.
• The Islanders drafted defenseman Eric Brewer with the fifth overall pick of the 1997 NHL Draft and rushed him into the NHL before he was ready. With the young player struggling, Milbury told the media, "This kid is playing like he's sniffing glue." The player continued to have frequent gaffes and he lost confidence, which is often par for the course for young defensemen navigating the NHL learning curve.
Milbury didn't see it that way. On the day of the 2000 NHL Draft, the Islanders traded Brewer, Josh Green (whom the Isles had acquired in the Palffy trade) and their 2000 second round selection (Brad Winchester) for defenseman Roman Hamrlík.
Hamrlik had some fine seasons for the Islanders atop their blueline and was acquired in the prime of his career. He had a better career than Brewer's. However, the Islanders' handling of Brewer in the first place was a textbook example of how NOT to develop a young defenseman.
Brewer went on play in an NHL All-Star Game (2002-03) and was a member of Canada's gold-medal winning 2002 Olympic team in a 1,000-plus game NHL career that has continued into the current season. His career hasn't lived up to his pre-draft hype of many years ago but a slew of players would gladly trade their own careers for his.
• Milbury traded struggling veteran goaltender Chris Osgood and a 2003 3rd-round draft pick to the St. Louis Blues for Justin Papineau and a 2nd-round pick (Jeremy Colliton). While Osgood tended to be a product of his environment -- he thrived twice in Detroit, and tended to be no better than the rest of the team while on struggling clubs -- he had bounceback years once he was back on good clubs. In return, the Isles got some modest success from Papineau for one year and a few NHL cups of coffee from Colliton.
Osgood added another Stanley Cup ring to his collection in 2007-08 as a split-time regular season starter with Dominik Hasek and the team's primary playoff starter (14–4 record, 1.55 GAA, .930 SV%). Was Osgood a "great" goaltender? Probably not, but he was good enough to win two Cups as a playoff starter and three Cups overall when he had enough talent around him.
Final note: Last year during the Olympics, Milbury went on the air after the preliminary round and gave a negative critique of the job that Mike Babcock was doing as Team Canada's head coach. That prompted former NHL referee and current HockeyBuzz blogger Paul Stewart to quip on Twitter, "That's like Yosemite Sam telling MacArthur how to command."
In the medal round, Team Canada was dominant. Babcock went on to add Olympic gold medal winning coach to his resume of being a Stanley Cup-winning coach. His teams (Anaheim in 2002-03 and Detroit in 2007-08 and 2008-09) have gotten to the Stanley Cup Final three times.
Now let's review Milbury's own NHL coaching career legacy. Spoiler alert: Its nowhere near Babcock's record of getting high-talent roster to fulfill their utmost potential and lower-quality squads to overachieve.
Milbury did take a talent-stacked 1989-90 Boston Bruins team -- featuring the likes of Cam Neely and Ray Bourque in their primes, Craig Janney, Bobby Carpenter, Glen Wesley, Garry Galley and, later in the season, Dave Poulin and Brian Propp -- the 1990 Stanley Cup Finals. The Bruins lost in five games to the post-Gretzky version of the Edmonton Oilers. In fairness, the Oilers still had a lot of great talent even without Gretzky and goalie Bill Ranford got red hot at the perfect time.
That year was the high point of Milbury's coaching. The next year, as a coach in the NHL All-Star game, Milbury drew criticism by choosing Bruins enforcer Chris "Knuckles" Nilan and Montreal Canadiens checking center Brian Skrudland for his roster while omitting Montreal star Kirk Muller and soon-to-(re)retire Hall of Fame legend Guy Lafleur. Although neither Nilan nor Skrudland ultimately played, citing injuries, Milbury embarrassed the league. After the season, the NHL Board of Governors changed the selection process to give the league final approval.
After two years of coaching the Bruins, Milbury later moved on be the GM and (sometimes) the coach of the Islanders. The teams he coached on the Island -- mind you, with rosters he assembled partially under duress from ownership to keep salaries down but mostly through his own talent assessments and acquisitions -- had a combined record of 56-111-24 in the 191 games he was behind the bench. That's a .382 winning percentage.
The reason why Milbury spent multiple partial-season tenures as the Islanders' coach in addition to one his full season (1995-96) was that he was very quick to pull the trigger on firing the head coaches he'd selected to try to get his poorly assembled rosters to overachieve while playing in one of the NHL's toughest divisions.
During his GM tenure, Milbury made a staggering number of coaching changes in his 11 years. Apart from appointing himself head coach several times, he hired and fired Rick Bowness, Bill Stewart, Butch Goring, Lorne Henning and Peter Laviolette. Lavy was fired after getting the Islanders into the playoffs two straight seasons after seven years of missing the postseason. Milbury then hired Steve Stirling and, finally, promoted Brad Shaw from assistant to head coach in 2005-06.
In short: Milbury's credentials for going on NBC to provide expert commentary on players, coaching decisions, trades and other league issues consist of being arguably the worst long-tenured NHL general manager of the modern era. He was mediocre head coach whose teams under-performed what they'd done under the coaches he'd just fired. He was someone who had his one brief post-playing career success with a roster loaded with already self-motivated star players. Milbury somehow even make a bigger mockery of the All-Star Game selection process, which is pretty tough to do.
The one thing Milbury is masterful at is opining loudly and colorfully. "Run-of-the-mill" NHL goaltender Steve Mason should consider himself in some mighty good company, especially among the other assessments of goaltenders that Milbury made over the years when his own team's future was riding on making the right judgments.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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