Al Arbour Returns to Fight the Number Nine

A week can’t go by without some form of New York Islander related homer-ism around these parts. It’s 3 o’clock on a Friday, meaning most of you have already clocked out if you didn’t take the day off and aren’t reading the blog at this point anyway. So hopefully most of you won’t notice until Monday morning, by which point you won’t care at all.

ANYWAY…

It so happens that tomorrow is the day that the Islanders will put Hall of Fame Coach Al Arbour behind the bench one more time in the hopes that he will get his 15,000th win 1,500th game coached. If you remember, the reasoning behind this is that current head coach Ted Nolan hates the number nine and was sick of seeing Arbour stuck on 14,999 career wins 1,499 games coached. This is not a marketing ploy to put ‘butts in seats’. Not at all.

“Every day last season I would walk by that big board outside our locker room at the Coliseum that lists the franchise’s award winners and milestones,” said Nolan. “And every day it would kill me when I’d see Coach Arbour made it to 1,499 games. “I asked (GM) Garth Snow if we could bring Coach back for one more game and to ask the NHL office to recognize it. They did, Coach Arbour emphatically said he was on board and now I can’t wait. It’s going to be an amazing night”

Sesame Street reports that the Number Nine is “very angry.”

What is an issue for the Islanders right now, is that they’re playing the Pittsburgh Penguins tonight. You know, the team with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. There there is also the Indestructible Man-Force known as Gary Roberts. Can the Islanders beat the Penguins? Sure, anything can happen. It’s funny though, because you would think that if they were going to make such a big deal about Arbour getting another win, they would have scheduled it for a night when they play, oh I don’t know, the Atlanta Thrashers.

I’m really interested to see what will happen if the Islanders are to lose tomorrow night. If Mike Milbury was still in charge, he would have gone and fired Nolan outright, installing Arbour as the team’s new coach. After that he would have traded Rick DiPietro and Mike Comrie for Kirk Muller. As much as I despise Milbury’s GM skills, he was always good for a laugh. That’s for sure.

In other news, the Montreal Canadiens may resurrect Toe Blake. More on that later… _uacct = “UA-1868762-1”; urchinTracker();

Ballhype – Al Arbour Returns to Fight the Number Nine
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