Kevin Poulin News

I don't trust goalies anymore. They're too unpredictable, too prone to fluctuations in numbers and performance that may or may not be their doing, and they wear funny pads -- pads that, even with recent restrictions, still take up yards and yards more space than the ones Billy Smith wore .

Two season ago, Al Montoya burst onto the Islanders scene as a fan favorite. In a dismal time when the team had lost an unimaginable number of goalies to injuries, he became the anchor.

Coming into the close of this season, the Islanders were pretty well situated in terms of expiring contracts.

A couple of ugly hits in the Western Conference final Game 2 last night -- one by Shane Doan that I found to be tough luck for him and one by Martin Hanzal that was exactly the kind of avoidable hit that the NHL has long tried to remove.

The Bridgeport Sound Tigers , the AHL affiliate of the New York Islanders , enjoyed their best regular-season performance in a decade, capturing the newly created Northeast Division-their first divisional crown since 2002.