Feeling the need to put this all in perspective… here’s Mike Milbury’s track record:
- Hired to be the Islanders coach, then three months later elevated to GM. Milbury had no executive experience outside of coaching.
- It subsequently took Milbury nearly two years to give up the bench role so he could focus on running the front office. When he finally committed to replacing himself as coach, he did so in
January and hired Rick Bowness — career record 83-227-33. Bowness barely lasted a calendar year before he was fired midway through the following season so Milbury could replace him with… Milbury again.
- The following season, Milbury inexplicably stayed on as coach again, despite having already said publicly that he couldn’t be effective in the GM and coaching roles at the same time. Of course it didn’t last, and for the second time, he ended up making a January coaching hire — Bill Stewart, who never coached in the NHL before or after this stint. By the summer, Milbury had fallen out publicly with Stewart and fired him.
- I could keep going about coaching choices, but I need to move on to his draft and trading record, so here are the numbers: in 10 seasons, Milbury hired and fired 7 coaches
not counting his own appearances of 3 partial-seasons behind the bench. In those 10 seasons, he made 5 mid-season coaching changes.
- Milbury’s draft record is perhaps not as bad as you might expect, but it’s soured by three glaring stains:
- drafting Rick DiPietro first overall in 2000 and giving him a massive unearned contract that is still paying him through ****ing 2029 (bearing in mind the #2 and #3 picks were Dany Heatley and Marian Gaborik).
- choosing Robert Nilsson at #15 in arguably the greatest draft of all time (2003) ahead of other first-rounders Parise, Getzlaf, Burns, Kesler, Richards, Boyle, and Perry.
- their best drafted player from 1998-06 was your pick of Tim Connolly, Cory Stillman, or Frans Nielsen.
- Milbury’s trade record is absolutely legendary. I will just present the facts without commentary, as it speaks for itself:
- Wade Redden (who would play over 800 games for Ottawa) for Bryan Berard (less than 250 games for NYI, then flipped for 33 terrible games from Felix Potvin)
- 3rd overall JP Dumont (822 NHL games) for Dmitri Nabokov (55 NHL games)
- Peak Chris Osgood for 69 games of Justin Papineau and 57 games of Jeremy Colliton
- Todd Bertuzzi AND Bryan McCabe (each of whom had around 1000 games ahead of them) for an unremarkable 1.5 seasons from Trevor Linden
- 23-year-old Zdeno Chara and the 1st rounder that became 2OA Jason Spezza for a 28-year-old Alexei Yashin who would never come close to PPG again
- A massive trade where the core was moving underrated star Ziggy Palffy (who went on to score 150 goals in 4 seasons for LA) for young Olli Jokinen. Which would have been fine, except…
- … after only one season, he flipped Jokinen AND his own 4OA draft pick Roberto Luongo for Mark Parrish and Oleg Kvasga.
That’s two HOF’ers and a handful of HOVG’ers for damned near nothing in return. He effectively gave the Senators and Panthers franchises a new lease on life.
And to cap all of that off, gave Yashin and DiPietro two of the biggest contracts in league history. Even 20 years later, Yashin’s 10x$8.75M deal still looked like something you’d give a legit franchise player at the beginning of his career, not a late-career malcontent. Both of those deals needed to be bought out at an enormous cost to the cash-strapped franchise.
The overall impact of all of this — the Islanders only made the playoffs 3 times in Milbury’s 10 years at the helm, losing 4-1 in the first round all three times. The next time they won a playoff series was a decade after his departure, which brings to mind the question of how good they could have been with Luongo, Chara, Bertuzzi, Palffy, Spezza, McCabe, Dumont, Redden, and almost anyone other than Nilsson from that 2003 draft.
So yeah… with all due disrespect to the others being named here, the landslide winner is Mike Milbury. There are so many ways he could have built a powerhouse contender on draft capital alone, and instead he damn near killed the franchise completely.
