Maven's Memories: A Scout's View of the Islanders First Training Camp

"It's a lot like puppy love. Nobody else takes it seriously, but it's real to the puppies!" -- Islanders scout Jim Devellano.

They were like puppies; those young Islanders who showed up for the franchise's first training camp 51 years ago in Peterborough, Ontario.

So, in a sense, was Jim Devellano who was one of general manager Bill Torrey's first hires as a scout for the new expansion team.

"I had been a very, very small part of the birth of the St. Louis Blues," Jimmy D recalled. "But with Bill and the Islanders I'd really be on the ground floor of an opportunity with a team that would take the ice for the first time in October 1972."

Devellano was one of the precious few who delivered a firsthand chronicle of what the birth of a few NHL team was like. In this case, Jimmy delved into the subject while writing his autobiography.

"Bill gave me a one-year deal at $9,000 a year," Devellano said in his autobiography. "That was a raise of a grand from what I was making in St. Louis."

Looking backward, Devellano -- now executive vice-president of the Detroit Red Wings -- could have felt he'd been underpaid. Under the circumstances, he had a huge challenge ahead of him.

Not only were the baby Isles up against another NHL expansion team, the Atlanta Flames, but the World Hockey Association now had become a direct competitor to the then 55-year-old existing circuit.

"The WHA was a serious threat to us," added Devellano, "and to me, personally, since I was the guy Torrey hired to find players for him. We picked 20 players in the Expansion Draft, but the WHA raided us and we lost seven to the new league."

It wasn't that the players lost were particularly significant but -- in the scheme of things before training camp opened -- an expansion team like the Isles needed every player it could get.

Devellano: "We were unhappy about the seven guys we lost to the WHA, but we did luck out in the sense that the outlaw league overlooked one player. We grabbed one who turned out to be a real gem, goalie Bill Smith, a future Hall of Famer."

Bow Tie Bill's choice of first-year coach was affable Phil Goyette. Why not? This was a first year team and Goyette had his first full-time coaching job. (Boston's Harry Sinden previously had rejected an offer to coach the Nassaumen.)

"To be fair to Phil," Devellano noted in his autobiography, "he never had a chance to succeed with what he had to work with. He was in a tough spot. Plus, none of the existing teams had any intention of giving us a break. In any kind of deal, they wanted to give us a cookie for a ham sandwich."

Or, as Torrey so aptly put it, "The others were like vultures trying to pick the meat off a carcass."

Isles owner Roy Boe had to pay a $6,000,000 admission fee to gain entry to the NHL fraternity

and like every other member of the organization, he didn't expect to get any breaks. For sure, the Rangers didn't give him one: the Blueshirts charged an additional $4,000,000 for "invading their territory."

It's fair to say that the franchise did get some breaks in the amateur Draft -- as opposed to the earlier Expansion Draft -- with a few potentially valuable picks. Billy Harris, the number one selection, would turn out to be a solid, if not spectacular, right wing.

Third-rounder, Bob Nystrom, emerged at Mister Islander after his 1980 Stanley Cup-winning goal. Second-rounder, Lorne Henning, was the architect of Ny's goal with the opening pass to John Tonelli . Meanwhile, Draft bottom-feeder Garry Howatt -- 144th of 152 -- emerged as one of the early grit guys responsible for the team's first playoff success in 1975.

As for the serviceable players -- apart from Smitty -- Torrey latched on to Stanley Cup-winning Bruin Ed Westfall and rugged defenseman Gerry Hart. Both proved invaluable in many ways during their residence in Uniondale.

"These guys were smart enough to realize that now they were getting a real chance to prove themselves," said Westfall. "And, for me, it was a new start. One thing I knew is that I had to retain my sense of humor."

Author Barry Wilner, who covered the team at the time, put it simply: "Those Islanders may have been sickening, but they also were laughable."

Watching their new team endure the first training camp neither Boe, Torrey, Devellano nor Goyette were particularly amused as they watched the chattels go through their motions. It was a dismal portent of things to come. But good things eventually would emerge from the bad.

As Devellano observed in his autobiography, the Isles dreadful 30-point, last place season proved that there were sweet uses in adversity.

"There was a silver lining ahead if we looked hard enough," Jimmy D concluded, "and the reward was our selecting first in the 1973 Draft. We got Denis Potvin, a legitimate superstar that we used to get the franchise turned around."