Breakup day on Long Island, for the past handful of seasons, came with a theme: We believe in the group.
No matter what the rest of the league, or the stats, or their own fans thought, the Islanders, almost uniformly, insisted on optimism.
Not Wednesday.
Big picture, yes, the organization is in a much better spot than it was a year ago. It’s got an 18-year-old superstar in Matthew Schaefer, a prospect pipeline that looks legitimately promising and real reason to believe there can be a contending team on Long Island in the very near future.
In the immediate?
“It’s a miserable feeling around here,” Mat Barzal said.
This breakup day was entirely rooted in reality, and the reality is that the Islanders were in a playoff spot for 105 days, then crashed out in epic fashion, losing 10 of their final 14 games and seven of their final eight, while getting their coach fired in the process.
They are still grappling with it, very much in the process of digesting and figuring out how this could have happened and what can be done to ensure it never happens again. But the Islanders wore this one.
“It absolutely sucks,” general manager Mathieu Darche said. “This morning is a terrible morning.”
Darche, who acted somewhat aggressively in adding Carson Soucy and Ondrej Palat before the Olympic break, then dealing a first-round pick to get Brayden Schenn at the trade deadline, repeatedly acknowledged that the year was a failure because the Islanders missed the playoffs. He did, though, offer some defense for those trades, which have been heavily criticized by the fan base.
“Did we get aggressive a little bit? Yeah. But you know what, I always said I’d rather fail trying than failing to try,” Darche said. “… Palat, Soucy, the acquisition cost was basically nothing. Cause we got some draft picks too. So in a way, those two days, Tsyplakov went out, we brought in Palat, Soucy and a sixth-round pick. We’re a better team, right, because of that.
“Schenn, we were in that position. We wanted to bring, cause we felt like yes, we could have defended better. Let’s bring some veteran guys that can help with that and push it forward. We went 4-1 [in the first five games after the deadline] and the last 10 games, our two leading scorers were [Cal] Ritchie and Schenn.
“So by the end result, yes it’s a failure because we didn’t make the payoffs. But to say that it’s because of those acquisitions, I don’t think that’s the case.”
What exactly is the root cause then? Darche didn’t have a firm answer on that, but he did allude more than once to the fact that the Islanders overperformed their underlying defensive metrics for most of the season. That was at the heart of why Patrick Roy was fired and Pete DeBoer hired with four games left in the season, and the Islanders’ improved shot suppression over those four games was a common talking point.
Things can always change but at least at a glance, the Islanders appear to have somewhat limited flexibility this offseason. Before accounting for any buyouts or injuries, they have $9-10 million in salary cap space, and Darche alluded to “slim pickings” on the free agency market.
There is some opportunity for change given Anders Lee’s expiring contract, and you never know what else could happen. If, say, Auston Matthews asks out of Toronto, maybe Darche steps up and takes a swing, but there’s a whole lot of ground between here and there. Almost certainly, Kyle Palmieri, Alexander Romanov and DeBoer — two injured players who missed most of the season with injury and the new coach — will be three of their biggest “offseason acquisitions.”
“We might have a similar team, we might have a completely different team,” Darche said.
What you can bank on is a shift in identity driven by the coach, and a general manager who will be more than willing to sound out options to change up the group. What that means for the roster composition when the Islanders gather for training camp in September, though, is anyone’s guess.
“The guys who are back need to be prepared come training camp to get to work,” DeBoer said. “Cause we have a lot of work to do in order to get where I believe we need to get to.”
