TORONTO — It’s easy to exercise cautious optimism after everything goes right in training camp. It’s harder to strike an appropriate tone when the last few days of preseason were rough enough that people in the organization started to feel uneasy.
“I will tell you, when I come into teams, it doesn’t happen immediately and it takes a while,” Islanders coach Pete DeBoer said Saturday night. “I can remember going into San Jose and us kinda taking one step forward, two steps back, probably till around Christmastime ’til we started playing seamlessly. … This is part of the process. And we’ve gotta be patient.”
This is not something you usually hear after a preseason game.
The giant caveat to everything — which doubles as another reason that training camp was less than ideal — is that Wednesday’s opener against Gavin McKenna and the Maple Leafs will be the first time the Islanders NHL lineup is all on the ice together.
That was supposed to be the case Saturday against the Devils, but the vagaries of preseason roster rules combined with understandable caution meant that Matthew Schaefer, Brayden Schenn and Tony DeAngelo were all held out of the 4-1 loss.
Logan Stanley, who will line up next to DeAngelo on the third pair Wednesday, was signed the next day. Mat Barzal of course, won’t be in the lineup at all, and has yet to start skating on his own, though he did travel for the opener, which was preceded by a couple of days of team bonding over golf up in Lake Muskoka, Ontario.
With Schaefer playing 23-25 minutes every night, the Islanders will inherently be a faster team than they looked during the exhibition season. That said, it’s not just the speed of a back end that’s been labeled old and slow for a long time — often unfairly — which has looked like a problem.
The Islanders have been slow to pick up DeBoer’s system, often getting caught out of position in the defensive zone. Alexander Romanov and Ryan Pulock, who will form the second pair, have both looked like they’re still getting up to speed following surgeries, with Romanov having played just 15 games last season.
The plan to open a spot for Isaiah George, a lefty, by playing Schaefer on his off side hit a snag when George couldn’t win a spot in camp, and so Stanley — brought in at the last minute, having skated with his junior team in Kitchener, Ontario, instead of attending an NHL camp — will be in the lineup ahead of Mayfield or Matthew Kessel, both righties.
“Obviously there’s some new things we gotta tighten up,” Mayfield told The Post. “We’re learning the system. I think we’re trying hard to implement it. We’re working hard, I would just say we’re not working as smart as we can be. We need to close quicker and we just need to win those battles. It’s all that quick closure, pin the guy, second guy quick, stuff like that.”
This, too, was a highly unusual thing to hear after a preseason game.
“We don’t hit a panic button in here,” Mayfield said, asked about the level of concern. “You gotta stay even keel. You can’t be panicking. I don’t like the word concern about how we play.”
Just like every optimistic declaration that someone has come to camp in the best shape ever, all of that can be rendered silly and forgotten if the Islanders come out flying against the rebuilt Maple Leafs.
For all his rhetorical caution, DeBoer has an excellent history of first-year turnarounds. Schaefer is a superstar. Ilya Sorokin will give the Islanders a chance to win every night. Victor Eklund was one of the best performers in camp, underscoring a prospect core that was by far the biggest positive of the last couple of weeks.
There’s 84 games still to come, and everything that’s happened so far is only the prologue.
The first few chapters of the season need to have a different tone.
