Temptation Island

Chris Osgood is the goalie for the hottest team in the NHL, but he still puts his pants on one leg at a time. The big news last week was that those pants were the correct shade of New York Islanders blue. The fashionistas at league headquarters had telephoned four times since the season began to insist that Osgood abandon his old Detroit Red Wings red hockey pants, and New York general manager Mike Milbury accepted that nagging with good humor. "If they have the time to worry about that," says Milbury, "the league is in really good shape."

The autumnal riot of colors should have been welcomed for a team whose color scheme might as well have included dishwater gray, but the NHL has rules governing uniforms, and justice isn't color-blind. Osgood, as superstitious as the next goalie, was reluctant to change a winning combination. After five days of breaking in his Islander-blue pants at practice, however, he unveiled them in a comeback 3-2 overtime road win against the Carolina Hurricanes last Friday that left New York one shy of the NHL record for most victories away from home to start the season (seven).

Following seven bleak, postseason-less years that included five ownership groups, eight coaches and two years of wearing those jerseys with the awful fisherman logo, in which they looked and played like Mrs. Paul, the Islanders have been readmitted to proper hockey society. Rising from the ashes of a last-place finish last season (21-51-7-3), the Islanders, as of Sunday, were the only team not to have lost in regulation and were 14-5 seconds from a perfect record. After going 1-42-1 when trailing after two periods in 2000-01, they were 2-0-1 under those circumstances this season and 8-0-1-1 overall. After winning only nine road games last year, they had won six this season. After leading the league in no category except chaos last season, they had the top goal scorer in right wing Mark Parrish, whose 10 goals matched the output of marquee stars Pavel Bure, Mario Lemieux, Teemu Selanne, Paul Kariya, Theo Fleury and Keith Primeau combined.

"Our expectations for ourselves are higher than anyone else's," Parrish said on the flight to New York after assisting on the winning goal by screening Hurricanes defenseman Glen Wesley on a face-off and kicking the puck to Mariusz Czerkawski, the kind of play winning teams execute. "Our goal is to be a powerhouse and to make a run at the Stanley Cup."

That matter-of-fact confidence was as startling as the smiles in the dressing room on a team that used to be so joyless that most veterans would have loved being voted off the Island. The Stanley Cup is always a popular topic on Long Island, but usually it's discussed in the past tense, dredged up whenever a stalwart from the early-1980s dynasty returns to have his number retired. That's what Bryan Trottier did on Oct. 20, with a raucous crowd cheering the old center and finding time to heckle Milbury. "Those weren't boos," says Mil-bury, who has been either the coach or general manager of the franchise since July 1995. "I know booing when I hear it."

Although he has been chastened enough to avoid taking premature bows, Milbury was reasonably certain that his trades in June for centers Michael Peca and Alexei Yashin and the September waiver gift of Osgood—a leader, a scorer and a No. 1 goalie, all of whom had played on reasonably successful teams—would put the Islanders on the road to respectability. New York blew past the respectability exit a mile ago and is pedal-to-the-metal to someplace interesting. The owners, Charles Wang and Sanjay Kumar, committed more than $115 million to those three players, including an astonishing $87.5 million, 10-year deal for Yashin, whose periodic contract squabbles in Ottawa suggest that commitment is not his forte. The deal, which raised NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's eyebrows, was more startling when you consider that the Islanders really wanted estranged Boston Bruins center Jason Allison.

Milbury's plan was to have the scoring center—who turned out to be Yashin—be a complementary player to Peca, who sat out last year in a contract dispute with the Buffalo Sabres. Peca, who was obtained for 20-year-old forwards Tim Connolly and Taylor Pyatt, signed with New York for $20 million over five years and was precisely the buffer Yashin needed. "Alex is an elite player, but the stronger the support group is around him, the stronger he's going to be," Peca says. " Ottawa had talented players, but as a group they weren't too strong [in the postseason]. They leaned on Alex. Here everyone can lean on each other."

The investment in Osgood—he makes $3.75 million this season and will earn $4 million in 2002-03—has been money well spent. Islanders goaltending has been an irritant for almost a decade because they have tried to get by with netminders who weren't as good as they had been elsewhere ( Ron Hextall, Felix Potvin and John Vanbiesbrouck) or who weren't as good as they would turn out to be elsewhere ( Tommy Salo with the Edmonton Oilers and Roberto Luongo with the Florida Panthers).

Last season Milbury tried to force-feed 19-year-old Rick DiPietro, who has exceptional but raw skills and whose every save looks like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat. DiPietro, the No. 1 pick in the 2000 draft, would still be on Long Island, sharing time with veteran Garth Snow, instead of in the minors, if Detroit had not been caught in a bind.

Over the summer the Red Wings had acquired six-time Vezina Trophy winner Dominik Hasek from the Sabres and could not afford to keep a big-ticket caddie to play 20 games. When they couldn't deal Osgood (teams didn't want to trade players plus pick up his sizable contract), the Wings exposed him in the waiver draft, the customary preserve of checking forwards and seventh defensemen, not a 28-year-old whose winning percentage ranks second to Ken Dryden's among goalies with at least 225 victories. Milbury scurried to make a trade or two that would free payroll space for Osgood until Wang, who has co-owned the team for 18 months, told him to grab Osgood and damn the expense. The move pushed the payroll to $36 million, more than double the shoestring budget of last season but only into the midrange of NHL teams.