Bringin' on the Heartbreak, Part 2

Monday was Kids Day, complete with team mascots running wild in the crowd and post-game puck shoots and concerts galore.

Frankly, children should not have been allowed to watch whatever it was the Islanders were doing on the ice. Final score: Buffalo 7, Isles 1.

We don't even feel like recapping the game. Providing details of that effort would just be wasting your time. Just know that the themes repeated in the post-game conferences were a) the execution from just about every Islander was poor, b) the final score was not all goalie Joey MacDonald's fault, and c) the Isles took a lot of meaningless, bad penalties but d) stuck up for their teammates in the fight-filled middle period.

Rick DiPietro was on the bench; his true condition is anyone's guess. Anyone with sense is not really buying the story of him being fit to play after today's debacle, despite Coach Scott Gordon's insistence that he's not a believer in pulling goalies.

Every positive lesson learned from Saturday's performance was thrown right out the window by Monday's. That and the fact that Buffalo makes opponents pay for their mistakes in areas that the weaker St. Louis team does not. Monday made it clear that while the Islanders can handle the lesser teams in the league they have a long road ahead of them before they can compete with the stronger outfits.

Compounding the bad feelings of the day was news that New York Rangers prospect Alexei Cherepanov collapsed and died while playing in Russia. The Rangers are our on-ice rivals, but everyone dreads hearing a story like this. Our condolences go out to Alexei's family and all who knew him. He was only 19 years of age.