Last night in Hockey Night in NY, the All-Star festivities are out of the way and now it's time for the Isles to go full steam ahead on their push towards the playoffs under new Head Coach Patrick Roy. Arthur Staple of The Athletic joined Sean and Stefen to cover it all.
Good Morning, Islanders Country.
You know things are getting real when Isles Territory drops a new hype video entitled “A New Era” before the season resumes tonight in Toronto.
For a few days, we were able to ignore this season's trials and tribulations and pretend that Mathew Barzal alone was the center of the Islanders hockey world.
There was our guy, the face of the franchise, going toe-to-toe with Connor McDavid and Cale Makar at the Skills Competition and helping all those Toronto Maple Leafs prevail at Saturday’s ASG with a goal and five assists.
But back to reality and back to business.
The Islanders have 33 games left to make this season memorable for reasons that don’t resemble the current narrative. What makes an already daunting task more challenging is they’re trying to figure things out on the fly.
They hired a new assistant coach (Welcome, Benoit Desrosiers), are welcoming back injured players, and squeezing in practice time, all while attempting to make a playoff push and leap several teams currently with higher points percentages.
Maybe if Lou Lamoriello made the coaching change in December or even early January, there would been enough time to absorb a Patrick Roy learning curve, but there isn’t. The Isles have to straighten things out, learn a new system, and start stringing wins together in a hurry for the rest of this season to mean something more than just a springboard to the next.
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