TORONTO — The Islanders, as close to a whole product as they can get while Mat Barzal is hurt, looked like a better, faster, more competitive team on Wednesday night than they had in a preseason that verged on alarming.
Just not better, faster or competitive enough to come away with two points.
For the fifth time in six years, the Islanders started their season with a defeat, falling to the Maple Leafs 2-1, opening 2026-27 with a performance that had a lot of fight and not enough finish.
“We all have more to give, especially me,” Matthew Schaefer said. “And I think we’re gonna learn from it.”
It wasn’t all bad at Scotiabank Arena. But — ironically given his own framing — the good for the Islanders almost exclusively came when Schaefer was on the ice, and that is a problem anyone could have predicted.
Schaefer, who was part of the headline bill against this year’s No. 1 overall Gavin McKenna, picked up right where he left off last season, his adjustment to the right side looking far more seamless than McKenna’s to the NHL.
Adam Pelech and Schaefer aside, though, the other two defense pairs looked like they were still getting their sea legs.
As was the case in preseason, the Alexander Romanov-Ryan Pulock pair looked rocky. Logan Stanley, making his Islanders debut alongside Tony DeAngelo, seemed to still be getting his bearings — and was victimized on the Leafs’ opening goal, when Colton Sissons beat him to Nick Paul’s feed for a successful redirection.
Five minutes after Sissons opened the scoring, the Leafs doubled their lead on the power play. Morgan Rielly batted the puck to keep it in off Ryan Pulock’s clearing attempt and Easton Cowan cleaned up the garbage on the ensuing blast from Jack Roslovic.
The Islanders were cleaner defensively after that, but the damage had been done. And offensively, it took them far too much time to get going.
“I think we can get some more pucks [in front],” Pulock told The Post. “I think we can get some more traffic there. I think in today’s game, in this league, it’s hard to beat a goalie when he sees the puck.”
Leafs coach Jim Hiller threw a huge test at Victor Eklund right away, matching Auston Matthews’ line against the rookie’s trio that included JG Pageau and Emil Heineman.
That made for an underwhelming night for Eklund, though, as coach Pete DeBoer said, he grew into the game. He was also far from the only one.
The second line was barely noticeable aside from Cal Ritchie’s struggles, and by late in the second period, DeBoer had moved Anthony Duclair — perhaps the Islanders’ best offensive forward on the night — into Matias Maccelli’s spot, demoting the latter to the fourth line.
Shortly thereafter, DeBoer put the entire lineup in the blender, hoping to spark them in the third period. Ironically, when the Islanders did get on the board, it was shorthanded, with Emil Heineman finishing off a 2-on-1 rush with Bo Horvat at 14:09 of the third.
Cutting the deficit to 2-1 with nearly six minutes to go gave the Islanders the opportunity they’d been looking for all night. But they couldn’t use it to squeeze out a point.
There were stretches, amid a game that wasn’t all that open, where the Islanders created extended pressure and forced Anthony Stolarz into action. Duclair, specifically, looked like the best version of himself, and had the Islanders’ best chance of the night when he skated across the crease and forced Stolarz to stretch all the way out to make a save in the third.
While the power play looked just as bad as it did last season, with an 0-for-4 performance that made it culpable, you could at least squint at parts of the 5-on-5 game and see building blocks.
“Work in progress,” DeBoer said of his team’s 5-on-4 game.
That could have applied to the whole thing.
