Long-Suffering Newsletter: Since when is stability a bad thing?
A new season begins on The Island, but don't tell anybody that
Welcome to the Long-Suffering Newsletter from the Islanders Anxiety Patreon. A new season begins on Saturday night. Godspeed.
If you went back into the archives of Newsday, The New York Daily News or any other publication that spent any amount of time covering the New York Islanders from 1996 to 2018, you’d probably pick up on a similar theme.
The Islanders were a team in the sports wilderness. They had no home, they had no identity and they had very little hope. There was asbestos in the ceiling, there was concrete in the toilets and the empty seats were everywhere.
Occasionally, there were lights at the end of the tunnel. But for the most part those flickers turned out to be mirages. There was even a franchise saviour, but he turned out to be a false prophet.
The columnists, bloggers, pundits and fans back then all wondered the same thing. What would it be like if the Islanders could get their act together. What would it be like if they could just catch a break. We all looked to the rafters for help. This team just needs an identity. This team just needs stability. This teams just needs a home.
Against the odds, the Islanders now have all of those things. In fact, things have been going relatively well for the Isles for so long — a whole six years — that you can be forgiven for forgetting what it felt like going to bed wondering if the Islanders would be there in the morning.
Perhaps that’s why there are so many skeptics out there questioning the Islanders plan for 2023-24. They don’t remember that they all used to say that this team was crying out for a period of stability and a chance to forge a successful identity. A culture change was needed, they would constantly advise from afar. That makes it all confusing that these same people now make cheap jokes about how the Islanders haven’t blown things up and are committed to the identity and culture that they’ve been building for the past five years.
These same people will try to convince you that the Islanders, a team that was lost in the sports wilderness for the better part of two decades, is now too stable.
The New York Islanders are too stable. Hard to wrap your head around it.
There are certainly some criticisms to be made about the way the Isles have been run during the Lou Lamoriello tenure. The Isles could benefit from a change to the fourth line, they definitely needed some more speed in their lineup and they were too slow to make changes to ineffective parts of their game (the power play, for example). And yes, maybe the long-term contracts handed out catch up to this team down the road, but why should the Isles’ 2026-27 salary cap picture matter for the 2023-24 season? Especially when the bones of this team are pretty darn good. The Islanders have an elite goaltending tandem. They’ve got top-of-the-roster talents Brock Nelson, Mat Barzal, Bowie Horvat, Adam Pelech and (maybe) Noah Dobson, and they have a strong, reliable supporting cast.
This isn’t just conjecture, either. The results showed that this team is capable of being a real menace. The Islanders went 17-9-4 with a +17 goal difference after the All-Star Break in 2022-23. That is good enough for a 104-point pace when you pro-rate it over 82 games. Oh, and Mat Barzal only played in six of those 30 contests.
Why would you break up a team that went on that kind of run and then gave the division-winner all it could handle in a best-of-7 series? A 93-point season and a first-round playoff exit should not be the cause of celebration for the Islanders at this point and I get that, but if you take a step back and look at the 2022-23 campaign as part of the bigger picture you should be encouraged that the club is staying on this track. The Islanders have made the playoffs four of the last five seasons and have won at least one round three times. What screams “tear this thing down!” about those results? Why are Insiders and Chart-Mongers calling us psychopaths for believing that this team, which has proven itself to be good, is going to be good again this season?
It’s all very confusing that people off the Island think that this team — one that spent two decades just to get to this level of success — should throw in the towel and try to start over.
We already did that. We already sucked for decades. We already did the win the draft lottery thing. It didn’t work out. But this way is working. Leave us alone. We like these guys. They’re our friends.
And go ahead and call us boring or dull. Trust us, we’ve heard a lot worse over the years than Ryan Callahan doing his fake-sleep bit on a god-awful ESPN broadcast. We had people — loved ones, even — ask us “Would you still root for the Islanders if they moved to Kansas City?” all the time. Fuck no.
I think it’s appropriate that the Islanders are the last team to play their first game of the season. It kind of reflects how the rest of the league feels about us. Are we sure we want these guys back in the league this year? They’re so boring, their general manager is dictatorial and their fans are foaming at the mouth. Let’s give it a good, hard think before we let them back on the ice.
Well, too bad. The Big, Bad, Boring Islanders and their clean-shaven faces are back on Saturday night. God help us all.
I always feel a sense of hope and optimism at this time of year. I dream of looking at the standings and seeing Islanders at or near the top of the Patrick/northeast/metropolitan whatever division. I think there is real reason for hope this year, with the aforementioned core, the goaltending, newcomers Bowie and Pierre, and hopefully the eventual glorious return of Zach. Anyway, god help us all and the more likely purgatory this team is about to put us through. But for two more days…we still have only hope.