Good Morning, Islanders Country.
It started so long ago you could still buy a Nassau Coliseum ticket with whatever change you found in a pair of jeans. Pat LaFontaine was the hope then—the brightest light in the dim years after the dynasty banners stopped going up. And when the Islanders traded him to Buffalo in 1991, it was impossible to know what it would mean for the franchise’s immediate and even very distant future.
That blockbuster deal—headlined as LaFontaine for Turgeon—sent a thousand branches shooting outward over 30+ years. Years of shuffling picks, flipping players, swapping futures for futures shaped a trade tree so tangled you’d need a botanist, a whiteboard, and maybe a stiff drink to follow along.
Yet all those little branches kept working their way toward the present. One pick begat another. One deal spawned two more. And eventually, improbably, it deposited the Isles at the 2018 draft, staring at Noah Dobson’s name at No. 12.
You can see the full, mind-blowing trade tree HERE
Dobson himself eventually became part of the tree, too. When the Islanders sent him to Montreal before the draft, back came Emil Heineman— an extra piece, a “throw-in” trying to find his spot in the league, along with two first-rounders.
And then came Saturday afternoon.
