According to Newsday, there has been "zero talk" of the islanders replacing Jack Capuano.
Capuano came to the postgame news conference following the Islanders 3-2 shootout loss to the Philadelphia Flyers clearly frustrated.
"Some guys need to play better, some are struggling, you saw the lack of puck battles, I don't need to tell you who they are. The level of concern for me is we had a power play goal from Johnny playing with Casey, Seidenberg had a goal. That's my concern. Where are we going to get point production? Took 134 points out of our lineup that we lost and we need to find a way."
It seemed the last statement was directed at general manager Garth Snow, hired Capuano to replace Scott Gordon on November 15, 2010. The average tenure of an NHL head coach is 2.4 years. Almost seven years later, Capuano is the fourth longest tenured NHL head coach.
Two of the three ahead of Capuano, Joel Quenneville and Claude Julien have won Stanley Cups. The third, Dave Tippett, has won a Jack Adams award, been to the Western Conference finals and won the Pacific division. Capuano has taken the Islanders to the playoffs three times, winning one series. True it's time to make a change, but it's not all Capuano's fault.
Andrew Ladd has been awful. one assist in 11 games. Jason Chimera, who had 20 goals last season, has just three assists in 11 games. Ladd has been regulated to the third line. Apparently the organization feels Alan Quine is better equipped at pulling Ladd out of this funk than John Tavares.
The team's possession numbers the past two seasons have been brutal.
Still relatively small sample size for this year, but here's the possession comparison to last year. pic.twitter.com/uaOTnjuOBU
— Platinum Seat Ghosts (@3rdPeriodSuits) November 4, 2016
The Isles are 22nd in shots against, dead last in score adjusted Corsi possession, and last night dumped the puck into the offensive zone 26 times and only retrieved it three times while generating one shot on goal.
Lets mention the youngsters now. Anthony Beauvillier and Mathew Barzal both broke camp with the team. Beauvillier has played well in his nine games. Barzal overcame a shaky debut and has played just two games. If Beauvillier played last night, the first year of his entry-level contract would have kicked in. So he sat and would not be surprised if he sits again. It infuriated me Travis Konecny and Ivan Provorov, both 19, in the lineup for the Flyers last night.
This team is stuck with the 18 skaters they have. No seventh defenseman, afraid to play their 19-year-old now and lets now get started on the three-goalie circus. If the team wants to make a move, they have very limited cap space. According to nhlnumbers.com, the Isles have 1.098 million available.