Islanders fans want Matt Moulson back, and they want him back right now.
During his three-plus seasons with the New York Islanders Matt Moulson was an extremely popular -- and productive -- player, scoring 112 goals in 293 games, including three-straight 30-goal seasons, before he was traded to the Buffalo Sabres for Thomas Vanek earlier this season.
He was back in New York as a member of the Minnesota Wild (Buffalo traded him at the deadline) on Tuesday, and he chipped in a pair of goals during a 6-0 rout of the Islanders. The hometown fans -- the ones that remained, anyway -- decided to close out the game with a booming "We Want Moulson" chant.
It was just another rough night in what has been an absolutely brutal season for the Islanders and their fans. After their first playoff appearance in five years last season, the bottom has completely fallen out from under them in 2013-14. The goaltending has been awful, the defense has been a mess, and then they lost their superstar and face of the franchise, John Tavares, for the remainder of the year due to an injury he suffered at the Olympics.
And that's to say nothing of the way the front office fumbled the Vanek situation at the deadline after trading Moulson and a first-round draft pick (either this year's pick, which is almost sure to be in the top-five, or next year's pick) to get him just a couple of months earlier.