It has been hard to figure out exactly what to make of this Islanders season, coach Barry Trotz said.
Between a 13-game road trip to start the season, a COVID-19 outbreak that hit as soon as the team opened up its new arena and further disruptions to the schedule due to the coronavirus, the Islanders didn’t get to play on a regular basis with a full lineup until mid-January. Even when that happened, they were playing nearly every other day for the final 50 games of the season — a breakneck pace to make up for being so slow out of the gate.
The Islanders were officially eliminated from the playoffs on Sunday night and, after a 3-2 overtime loss to the Panthers on Tuesday, they sat at 35-31-10. In some ways, the game was a microcosm of the season: The Islanders depended on Ilya Sorokin to make 39 saves, but ultimately fell short, giving up a hat trick to Aleksander Barkov that included a game-winner just 20 seconds into overtime after a defensive breakdown.
The score looked closer due to Sorokin’s play. They generated just 26 shots and, even after taking a 2-1 third period lead on a Jean-Gabriel Pageau goal, it never quite felt they were in control.
Ten days from now, when the season ends, it will be considered a failure; there is no arguing that. But in terms of evaluating for the future and what the organization must do this offseason, the picture is murkier.
“Usually you’ll look at a season, you’ll play three games a week and you’ll get a really good assessment,” Trotz said Tuesday morning. “And you’ll know where your guys are, you’ll think you’ll know where they are, it’s a normal thing. This year it hasn’t [been]. Some guys take a little longer to get going. Just body type, mental capacity if you will or whatever. It’s made it a lot more difficult to evaluate.”
With six games left before everyone goes home for the summer, Trotz wasn’t ready to make a big-picture determination on what the Islanders need to do to improve over the offseason. But it is clear that bad luck is only part of the equation.
Since Jan. 13, when the Islanders returned from their final schedule disruption, they played at a 92.4-point pace, if extrapolated over 82 games. That would have gotten them closer to the playoffs, but they still would have been out of the running. The Capitals, in the final Eastern Conference wild-card spot, had 96 points entering Tuesday.
The reasons why the Islanders missed the postseason start was the offense.
They were 25th in the league in per-game scoring entering Tuesday, at 2.75 per game. Though they were happy to remind reporters after losses that they prefer to grind out wins with a defensive style, that is not good enough. Nor is a 19.37 percent conversion rate on the power play, 22nd in the NHL.
Faced with salary cap and expansion draft conundrums last year, general manager Lou Lamoriello chose to commit to Adam Pelech and Ryan Pulock on the back end over the long term. He also sacrificed Jordan Eberle in the expansion draft and Nick Leddy via trade, hoped Kyle Palmieri could produce from the wing, signed veterans Zdeno Chara and Zach Parise, kept Andy Greene around on the third pairing and extended Casey Cizikas to keep the Identity Line intact.
In short, Lamoriello doubled down on the style of play the Islanders rode to the Stanley Cup semifinals the previous two seasons, and made major bets that Palmieri would produce and the team’s age wouldn’t backfire on it.
The decisions backfired.
Though Palmieri salvaged his season statistically in the end, it took until mid-February for him to score his second goal of the season. Replacing Eberle on Mathew Barzal’s wing also took longer than anticipated, with the Islanders shuffling through forward-line combinations until finding something that seemed to work late in the season. (Even that has run into issues lately, with Oliver Wahlstrom getting benched).
On the back end, the Islanders struggled to replace Leddy’s ability to drive play, and an injury to Pulock sidelined him for a key stretch of the season, from mid-November through the start of February. Though Chara was serviceable on defense and the penalty kill, the team went a chunk of the season with Noah Dobson as the only defenseman who seemed capable of generating offense.
Those aren’t the only issues. Nearly everyone — save perhaps Brock Nelson, Ilya Sorokin and Dobson — has underproduced, and rarely did all the pieces click at the same time.
Combined with the issues that were out of the Islanders control, it all added up to a disaster. Things have been better since March — the Islanders have played at a 97.7-point pace that would have had them in playoff contention over an 82-game season. But that was too little, too late.
“There’s obviously some unforeseen circumstances that came into play,” Matt Martin said. “We didn’t do a good enough job of fighting those things off and we paid for it at the end of the day.”
