![]() The old Boston Garden, with its shoebox of a visitors locker room, is long gone. Madison Square Garden underwent a renovation last decade. Joe Louis Arena, where Anders Lee remembers the walls being particularly bouncy, had its last hurrah in 2017. The list of arenas where factors like that continue to be an advantage is dwindling. Where an opposition coming in here once, maybe twice a year, they probably wouldn’t know that.” The Islanders said goodbye to the Coliseum - and its legendary bounces - this season. They’d actually play a little more dot line, cause didn’t always play true. “When the puck comes around by our door, when we were at the Coliseum, our wingers wouldn’t get their skates on the wall. “I think you know your own rink, you know your own bounces,” Trotz said. It does, though, have a place - however small. More pressing would be the COVID-19 outbreak the Islanders suffered right around their home opener, more diversity in the schedule and the simple fact that the 2021-22 Islanders are not as good of a team as the 2020-21 Islanders. Knowing how the puck plays off the boards is, surely, a miniscule part of that equation. The Islanders’ new arena came with all the comforts of the modern NHL arena - and many fewer quirks. Well, last season, the Islanders were 21-4-3 in their building. And with it, all those little things that added up to something of a home-ice advantage. “Time always wins.”Ī new arena, though, takes time out of the equation. “There was some of those things that kick off real strange and you had to be ready for them,” Islanders coach Barry Trotz said. There was a dead zone in one end of the ice and on the other, a door that would loosen up. Part of the reason the Islanders were so desperate to get out of Nassau Coliseum, after all, is that the building was a relic of the era in which it was built - a characteristic that extended to the playing surface. The character of the place comes in the form of its amenities. There are no quirks or intricacies to its ice. The thing about UBS Arena, shiny and new as it may be, is that it gives players in the game an experience that might best be described as normal. Islanders fail to rise to Ilya Sorokin’s level in ugly Devils loss ![]()
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