Garth Snow Autograph Card

I featured Garth Snow a couple of years ago as he'd done a fairly decent job of keeping the New York Islanders afloat as their general manager in what can now be qualified as ''despite owner Charles Wang'' who, it turns out, was the main reason why the Isles were caught with ridiculously long-term and expensive contracts.

He first brought trusted veterans to the fold (Bill Guerin, Doug Weight, Ryan Smyth, Mark Streit, Lubomir Vishnovsky, and Evgeni Nabokov), drafted well (John Tavares, Brock Nelson, Griffin Reinhart), stockpiled draft picks, then took advantage of other teams' binds to acquire the core pieces of the back end that he so sorely needed: goalie Jaroslav Halak, and defensemen Nick Leddy and Johnny Boychuk.

He's been savvy and he's been gutsy, particularly when he traded for Thomas Vanek in the hopes that he would like playing with Tavares enough that he'd sign with the team. But he was like that when he played too, always using his brain to get an edge over the opposition, whether it was through trash-talking or modifying his equipment (as mentioned in my previous post).

He's played for Team USA twice, at the 1994 Olympics and the 1998 World Championships.

Here he is with the Vancouver Canucks, on card #144 from In The Game's 1998-99 Be A Player set (the gold variant of the signed insert sub-set):

On it, he's wearing the team's turn-of-the-millennium white (home) uniform, which I strongly preferred to what they currently wear. The card itself is signed in thin black sharpie.

I'm also a fan of the mullet he's sporting on the back of the card:

And to think, he and Tim Thomas were Québec Nordiques draft picks...