The fan base, which has been asked to pay higher prices for tickets, merchandise and parking at a new arena over the past two seasons, deserves to know what is happening with the coach and general manager. Lou Lamoriello’s future with the Islanders has not been addressed since the team’s playoff ouster. Whether the quiet from the Islanders’ organization since breakup day reflects continued deliberation on the future of Lou Lamoriello or not, some clarity is owed sooner rather than later.
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Oliver Wahlstrom’s return from a major knee injury should help, and having Mathew Barzal and Bo Horvat together for a full season is a major boost.īut this is not going to fix itself. The more optimistic outlook is they can take steps in the right direction with the right moves this summer. There is too much money locked up in too many players who are not going to get faster overnight. The inconvenient truth for the Islanders is there is probably no way to completely mitigate this issue over one offseason.
It was no coincidence, either, that Engvall and Hudson Fasching, two players who raised the Islanders’ quickness quotient, made positive impacts during the regular season. It was no coincidence that the Islanders’ best line in the playoffs - Pierre Engvall, Brock Nelson and Kyle Palmieri - was the line that could best match Carolina’s speed. The Hurricanes’ blend of physicality and speed was too much to keep up with for the Islanders’ more plodding attack. They dispatched of the Islanders in six games in the first round, and are one win away from the conference finals.
The Hurricanes had a similar statistical profile to the Islanders over the course of the regular season and play a defense-oriented game, but they do it with speed up and down their lineup. The Jets, the only other playoff team that was as one-dimensional as the Islanders were, lost in the first round and are reckoning with serious changes to the team’s core. That left them with a collective shrug of the shoulders on the power play for nearly the entire season. Getting the puck deep is not a particularly effective way to play at five-on-four, but the Islanders never found a way to skate into the offensive zone and set themselves up. It also helps explain why the Islanders were so awful on the power play. And over an 82-game regular season, it is harder to try to win that way every night than it is to face a team that tries to win that way every so often. Maybe that wore down the opposition, but it also meant the Isles worked harder than nearly any other team in the league to score a goal. That is all well and good, but the extreme to which the Islanders took it was problematic because it meant that to score just once required a heavy workload. This was a product of their strength as a team - winning battles, being hard below the hashes, wearing the opposition down. The Islanders struggled all season to generate scoring off of controlled entries, preferring to get the puck deep and forecheck. The reason behind that lack of offense is a lack of speed. Numerically, that comes in the form of offense. There is a noticeable gap between them and the top teams in the league. It took them until Game 82 to clinch a playoff berth. Including the postseason, the Islanders won 44 times and lost 44 times. Without the ability to consistently create separation on offense, the Islanders were forced to work harder than most for a lot of their scoring this season. It does not inherently preclude them from winning.īut they did not have the speed, the extra gear, that makes it just a little bit easier to find offense in the moments when you need it. There is virtue to the physical, defensive style the Islanders play. Watching the second round of the playoffs after watching the Islanders in the regular season and the first round is like renting a car with an eighth gear after driving around something that stops in seventh. It is that the roster they’ve built prioritizes physicality at the expense of speed - a necessary attribute to win four out of seven games, four times in a row, against the league’s best teams. The alarming thing about the Islanders, though, is not that they are physical. It is probably time to reevaluate this phrasing. The Devils are in the second round, though they could be eliminated in Game 5 against Carolina. The Islanders lost in the first round of the playoffs. The Islanders this season were purportedly hard to play against.
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“Hard to play against” in hockey tends to be code for “a team that hits hard.”
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