Yesterday, Mike Milbury was asked his thoughts during a media conference call on the many changes that new Tampa Bay Lightning owners Len Barrie and Oren Koules have brought to "Hockey Bay USA."
His answer seemed to suggest he had forgotten his previous job with the New York Islanders:
"The big thing about this season with the Tampa Bay Lightning, they've thrown a whole bunch of fun at the league. If I had a couple or 500 million extra dollars running around, I might like to go out and buy a franchise and do some things like they did."
OK, so he didn't have the money to buy an entire franchise. Milbury was just put in charge of a team owned by Charles Wang, a man with very deep pockets. I'm pretty sure he did some of the same things that Barrie and Koules are doing now in terms of overhauling a roster to improve the team, but it was a rather large epic fail.
Those poor fans missed out on seeing guys like Zdeno Chara, Wade Redden, Zdeno Chara, Olli Jokinen and Roberto Luongo have successful careers wearing an Islanders jersey. Instead, it was night after night of "Mike Must Go" chants inside Nassau Coliseum until "Mad" Mike was removed from his general manager duties to a different job within Wang's sporting conglomerate.
If you haven't checked out the transcript, you can do so here. It a decent read, but also well worth it just to read Eddie Olczyk non-answer to Wysh's question about the upcoming year on Versus, which he touched on yesterday.
