Really sad. Knew about his decline in health a couple months back and was hoping he'd pull through. One of the true legends of the game. One of the classiest things in sports I ever saw was when Nolan convinced Isles management to bring back Al behind the bench for 1 more game so he could hit an even 1500 games coached.
RIP Al
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Disappointing that so few posters stopped by this thread to pay their respects. I guess most of them are too young to remember those Islander teams coached by Al Arbour that won 4 Stanley Cups back to back to back to back.
He was a great coach of a great team. He will be missed.
Those 80's Islander Oilers series. I always looked at Al Arbour as the anti-Glen Sather. Sather was a mouthy, arrogant dick. Arbour let his record speak for itself and was all class.
__________________ Are the Oilers trying to set a record for most scumbags on the payroll??
Location: A simple man leading a complicated life....
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He pioneered the use of videotape -- don't let anyone tell you differently -- viewing the flickering images in a darkened room of his sprawling home in Cold Spring Harbor that his devoted wife, Claire, called "the dungeon." It was there that he noticed between games of the 1976 quarterfinals against Buffalo that star center Gil Perreault regularly skated across the blue line with the puck and screeched to a stop at a spot between the faceoff circles.
Arbour directed his defensemen to converge on that space, forcing Perreault to surrender the puck. And Perreault scored only two goals while the Islanders swept the last four games to take the series, 4-2.
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He and lifelong pal Scotty Bowman were among the first coaches to borrow the Russian concept of using five-man units, pairing defensemen with the same forwards, and there wasn't a coach alive whom Arbour couldn't outfox. He fooled his players, too, so they nicknamed him "Radar," because he always seemed to know what they were thinking or doing.
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He was before his time in so many other ways, some of them off the ice. When the Islanders were debating whether to allow a female reporter into the locker room in the prehistoric era of the 1980s, Arbour said he'd leave the decision up to the players, but urged them "not to do anything that would cost that young lady her job."
Al Arbour has passed away
