Gordon's return to Long Island

In hockey you are taught to not get too far ahead of yourself. Worry about whom you are playing next; not who you are playing down the road.

For the Toronto Maple Leafs, their next game is a home encounter against the Buffalo Sabres; a club that is nipping at their heels for the eighth and final playoff position in the Eastern Conference. The Leafs have lost three games in a row and four of their last five at home.

If you are Leafs assistant coach Scott Gordon, you can be excused for looking past the Buffalo game to the one you have circled on the calendar. That would be Friday night when Toronto travels to Long Island for a meeting with the Islanders.

Just so happens Gordon used to be the head coach of the Islanders. Being a true pro, Gordon won’t admit to looking beyond Thursday night’s home game.

"Obviously I know we’re playing the Islanders, but I haven’t really thought about it much," Gordon said. "Maybe if I was a head coach, it would be different. I haven’t had that, ‘it’s-your-old-team’ thought process going. On top of that, I’ve been pretty busy so I haven’t had much time for forward thinking."

A former NHL goaltender who played 23 games with the Quebec Nordiques over two seasons, Gordon was 17 games into his third season as head coach of the Islanders last year when he was fired and replaced by Jack Capuano. After a good start to the year, the Islanders dropped 10 straight games and that was it. Truth of the matter is, even though the Islanders had a solid second half, Scotty Bowman couldn’t have gotten that team to the playoffs.

This was not a case of a coach like Bruce Boudreau not being able to motivate the likes of Alex Ovechkin, Alexander Semin and Nicklas Backstrom to meet their potential. No, where Gordon and the Islanders were concerned, it was more a case of a coach being asked to make chicken salad out of chicken do-do.

After opening 4-1-2, the Islanders went 0-9-1 and averaged just 1.7 goals per game in that stretch. Gordon said you could almost feel things starting to turn even when the team was winning.

"You could see a trend occurring," he said. "The last couple of wins we were just okay. Then the next two were losses, but we were just okay and then we had three were losses and we weren’t very good at all. In my last five games I figured if we weren’t going to score goals, we had to keep pucks out of our net and we tightened up. To the players’ credit I think in the last four games leading up to my final game we only gave up five or six goals. We just couldn’t score."

Gordon wasn’t shocked when the Islanders let him go. Nor was he surprised when the team started winning – mainly because that group of players was not the group he coached.

"It’s funny, if you look at the lineup I finished with, the next 10 or 12 games weren’t there whether it was because of injuries or guys being sent down (to the minors) or released or because of trades.

Asked about his most lasting memory of coaching the Islanders, Gordon said that is easy.

"It was almost like there was one crisis after another with all the injuries we had," Gordon said. "The first thing people told me when I took the job was I’d never have to worry about goaltending. Turned out goaltending was a constant worry from the day I took the job until the day I got fired. To Rick DiPietro’s credit he did everything in his power to try to get back healthy, but it never played out that he was able to get back to his all-star form. That certainly made the first year difficult not having him and the second year it was good, but we had the three-headed monster in goal. We had three guys who had all been No. 1 goalies and who all wanted to play – DiPietro, Martin Biron and Dwayne Roloson. The last year Rick was healthy, but in his defence, he didn’t get a whole lot of support."

A lot of coaches, when they are fired, worry they’ll never work again in the NHL. Not Gordon, though.

"Maybe it’s a little bit different because they have their eye on a head coaching job, but for me, if I had gotten a head job it would have been great, but I knew my circumstances as a head coach in the NHL probably weren’t ideal, with all the injuries," Gordon said. "For me coming here and having the opportunity to work with someone who has been coaching in the NHL for a long time was great. I knew Ron before I came here and I just wanted to see how somebody else’s day to day operation was like to learn from."

So far, even though the Leafs have had their share of ups and downs through the first 33 games, Gordon has been impressed.

"I think the way Ron gets players to play with speed and skill is something that I would take with me to my next game, because there’s certainly an element of passing that, by the way we are doing things, we are doing them better than I did," Gordon said. "There are some things that I did with the Islanders that have been reaffirmed. For me it has been good to step back and stay in the background and watch a little bit and to be able to dissect film a little bit differently; not as the head coach."

After the Leafs failed to make the playoffs for the sixth year in a row – and third since Wilson was named head coach – changes were made. Assistant coaches Tim Hunter and Keith Acton were not re-hired and Gordon and Greg Cronin were added to the staff. Rob Zettler, who works with the defencemen, was retained.

Veteran hockey columnist Mike Brophy will cover the Toronto Maple Leafs for sportsnet.ca for the 2011/12 season.