The 13-day sprint Pete DeBoer is conducting leaves the Islanders coach little time to turn his first training camp into a boot camp.
The new-ish face, who coached the last four games of 2025-26, cannot assert himself with the sort of sprints and conditioning that were a hallmark of training camps past.
Through three days, with the preseason opener Sunday afternoon in Newark, DeBoer’s training camp has been heavy on systems work, with a day of scrimmaging on Friday to get the competitive juices flowing.
That’s largely a matter of necessity given the condensed calendar, but the main effect of the time squeeze is to cut off the fat and force every coach to focus on their priorities.
What are DeBoer’s?
“We prioritize trying to get our structure in defensively,” DeBoer said earlier this week. “That’s where most of the bleeding with this group, in my mind, happened last year.”
Indeed, there is little need to recite the litany of stats showing the Islanders’ disastrous performance in their own zone a year ago, arguably the biggest factor in their collapse out of the playoff race.
DeBoer changed what he could on the fly at the end of last season, but that could only be so much 78 games into the season.
Now is when he can rip out the foundation and lay down something new.
Mathew Barzal’s absence from camp underscores a reality the Islanders will be living with all season.
While their roster is far from bereft of talent, they simply lack the offensive firepower of most playoff teams.
The more games they need to win 4-3, the fewer games they will win.
“We’re latching onto box-outs, just taking care of the middle of the ice,” Brayden Schenn told The Post. “We didn’t do a good enough job of that last year. Numbers showed that. When you collapse in the middle and take away the dangerous parts of the ice, you give yourselves and your goalies the chance to stop pucks.”
Breakouts and the neutral zone are different, too, and the process of trying to remake the power play began Saturday.
The Islanders have no choice but to latch onto the new ideas and learn them fast. That is going to be largely down to the coach teaching them.
“Detail with how everyone goes. It’s pretty black and white,” Schenn said, describing DeBoer’s style. “What we need to do, what the system’s like, what he’s looking for. Whether that’s breakouts, D-zone, neutral zone. He doesn’t have a million ideas. He has the right ideas.”
“It makes everybody’s life a lot easier,” Bo Horvat told The Post. “You’re not thinking about 1,000 things or what you have to do out there.”
Unlike the last couple coaches to come through here, DeBoer is a proven commodity at the NHL level. His track record — the last time he missed the playoffs in his first full season coaching a team, it was 2008-09 and he was a rookie head coach — is one of the biggest reasons to believe the Islanders can surprise people this season.
It’s been an alarmingly long time since Barry Trotz took a team widely viewed as having a talent deficit and pushed it into contention. That might be what’s required of DeBoer.
“I think [he’s] just really installing an identity for our team to be a fast-paced team,” Cal Ritchie told The Post. “Move the puck quick, move our feet quick, get up and down the ice quick. That’s how you’re gonna generate offense in this league: beat teams quickly and not let them get in position, cause when teams get in position, you’re not really gonna beat their structure. Just trying to play quick, play smart, detailed hockey.”
