All those Isles D-men

If Jamie Doornosch plays tonight, as expected, he will be the 14th defenseman
used by the Isles this season. Assuming Jack Hillen can't go tomorrow, it is
likely a 15th d-man would get the call.

Best as I can tell, it will be the 4th time in club history that the Isles have
used at least 15 defensemen in a season -- they also used 15 in 1997-98 and
again in 1999-2000.

The club record of 16 was set in the 1995-96 season: how many of these do you
remember?

Bob Beers
Dean Chynoweth
Bob Halkidis
Jason Herter
Kenny Jonsson
Darius Kasparaitis
Scott Lachance
Chris Luongo
Bryan McCabe
Rich Pilon
Mathieu Schneider
Brent Severyn
Jason Strudwick
Milan Tichy
Dennis Vaske
Jason Widmer

If Martinek plays in the last two and Jack Hillen does not, it will mark the 2nd
time in his Isles career that Martinek has played as many games as any other
Islander defender. Martinek played a team high 69 in 2007-08 and would tie
Hillen with 64 this season. If he plays the two games, Martinek will have
played in 453 of a possible 738 games over the past nine seasons.

Blueprint for the future -- use fewer defensemen! The last time the Isles used
fewer than 10 was 1992-93... a very nice spring on Long Island. Both the 1980/81
and 1981/82 teams used only eight en route to Cups #2 and #3. In 1981/82, Darcy
Regier played 6 games and Paul Boutilier played 1. The regular 6 defensemen
(Potvin, Persson, Langevin, Morrow, McEwen and Lane) played all of the others.

Forever1940 is the nom de plume of Eric Hornick, statistician on Islander home
telecasts since 1982. Visit my blog: forever1940.blogspot.com and follow me on
Twitter @ehornick