Isles pull off another odd move, give GM post to Snow

	Garth Snow announced his retirement from the game just two minutes before being named general manager of the Isles. Len Redkoles/Getty Images
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From the franchise that brought you scam artist/owner John Spano, those fishsticks uniforms and enough egregious hockey and bumbling management to all but destroy the legacy of one of the National Hockey League's dynastic powers of the 1980s, we now have the curious one-month reign of general manager Neil Smith.

After an exhausting if not necessarily exhaustive search, the oddest duck in the NHL's petting zoo, Islanders owner Charles Wang, awarded Smith a three-year contract in June (along with a neat leather jacket with the Islanders' logo). On Tuesday, he fired Smith -- we'll see if Smith gets to keep the jacket and the more than $2 million he signed for over the course of the deal -- and gave the job to Garth Snow, an Islanders goalie with a pretty decent record of stopping pucks, but nothing else on his résumé that would suggest he is even remotely qualified for the job.

If Smith were going to be fired for some of his free agent signings -- three years for Mike Sillinger? Tom Poti? -- then Wang would have ditched Mike Millbury, who resigned during the 2005-06 season after years of misfiring trades, long ago. Nor could this have been a simple power struggle between Wang and Smith, because the owner had the entire arsenal. Smith, the GM of the New York Rangers when they won the Stanley Cup in 1994, was so eager to run a team after working as a consultant and broadcaster for six seasons that he took the job even though he had no say in the hiring of coach Ted Nolan or some of the other standard areas (scouting, for example) in which GMs customarily have a certain degree of latitude.

But no matter how badly he wanted in on the action, Smith would never have been comfortable as a glorified errand boy, the mouthpiece for a board that Wang wanted to make all the hockey decisions, just one voice in a cacophony of views. There isn't one experienced GM who would.

Apparently, Wang was not merely ready to turn the page after Milbury announced his resignation as GM -- he is still in Wang's employ -- the owner was ready to burn the whole damn book. Instead of a direct chain of command, a system that seems to work best in the NHL -- and indeed in most business --Wang went about creating fiefdoms within his own dysfunctional organization. Before hiring Nolan and Smith last month, he brought in the strong-willed Bryan Trottier, an ex-Islander great and failed Rangers coach, as director of player development. He then announced his new coach and GM while also repatriating Pat LaFontaine, a Hall of Fame ex-Islander player as special counsel. This was going to be hockey-by-committee, a recipe for chaos.

Smith might not have been able to reinvent the Islanders, but at least he had some portfolio. In addition to the Cup with the Rangers, Smith, then a scout for Detroit, was part of the greatest draft ever: the 1989 Red Wings class that included Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Vladimir Konstantinov and Sillinger, the first-rounder. Despite his reputation as a free-spender that he cultivated with the Rangers, Smith's hockey roots were in scouting and development, an area in which the Islanders have been woefully deficient. He had been around the executive side of the business for two decades.

When Snow was hired -- he had the grace to first announce his retirement from the game -- he hadn't been around the executive side for two minutes.

There is precedent for Snow's success, of course. Defenseman Serge Savard played out his career in Winnipeg and then rejoined Montreal as managing director in the mid-1980s, becoming the architect of Stanley Cups in 1986 and 1993. Snow might not be as savvy as Savard, but he is a keen and often acerbic observer of the NHL. What he isn't, of course, is a strong manager. At least not yet. He will have to learn as he goes with a flummoxed franchise that thinks GM is an entry-level position.

As the process of hiring a new GM dragged on last winter, I asked Milbury at an Islanders morning skate what was taking so long. His answer: "Charles needs to feel really, really comfortable with the guy before he hires him."

Well, for a franchise that plays by its own rules -- and not very well, as you know -- Wang needed a month before he felt uncomfortable with Neil Smith.But you have to hand it to these wacky Islanders. Just when you thought you had seen everything, this once-proud franchise comes up with something even more bizarre.

This time it's Snow in July.

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