I attended the noontime Islander practice today at Iceworks and got a little bit of a surprise with the sudden appearance of none other than Rick DiPietro. For photos proving that there was indeed an ACTUAL sighting, you can check www.7thwoman.blogspot.com if you'd like.

But after practice had ended, I went into the coaches' locker room with Newsday’s Katie Strang, Chris King and the ITV camera. It’s a tight little room, smaller than a Levittown 3rd bedroom. The stalls are all meticulously marked, Gordon, Chynoweth, Trottier & Morrow (they share), Dunham, Allen and “Sudsie.” Gordon sat and answered questions in a strong voice. I backed up a little and decided to give the camera crew their space and decided to talk to Scott Allen instead. I was trying to whisper so the camera crew didn’t pick up my questions. Hopefully I succeeded, because oddly, my own digital recorder picked up Scott Gordon’s answers even LOUDER than Scott Allen’s! Hopefully I’m not misquoting him here.

I asked Scott Allen about tomorrow’s day game against the LA Kings. As we know, the Islanders record for day games isn’t exactly impressive. I asked if he had experienced the same thing before and if perhaps it has to do with a disruption of a team’s usual schedule.

“The routine is broken, but… Like today -- We practiced at noon. Depending on your schedule, most of the time you practice in the morning between 10 and 11 practice begins, but from training camp through early into the season, you end up practicing at different times. So, it’s just making an adjustment. The biggest adjustment is to the game day routines are eating, rest and hydration. Those type of things. But once the puck is dropped, it doesn’t matter if it’s 7, 2 or 11 o’clock in the morning, you still gotta come and perform.”

Both Allen and I are hopeful the daytime game will have more of an annoyance to the LA Kings than to the Islanders. “Whichever team that can adjust quicker will get the early jump.”

When I asked Scott Gordon about the early game factor, the man who keeps all the details and data in his head had another explanation for the higher percentage of Islanders daytime losses.

“A lot of the problems with day games last year were that we didn’t have a practice the day before because of the way the schedule was dictated. So, last year we started the year we played Friday, Saturday and had a day off because you don’t really practice when you’ve played back to back and then we played an afternoon game. No practice on Sunday, no pre-game skate and we played that like. I know that happened on three occasions.” With luck tomorrow will have better results.

And let’s hope the Monday game doesn’t end in yet another overtime loss. We’ll have to check the stats machine and see what the longest running streak of a team having to use overtime to determine their fate is. But it would be very pleasant if the Islanders can put the game away in regulation and actually play a FULL 60 minutes.

Day games, like Islander Kryptonite.

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