Long-Suffering Newsletter: Time to watch some scoreboards
It's time for the Islanders to go into a parallel dimension for six weeks
Welcome to the Long-Suffering Newsletter from the Islanders Anxiety Patreon. The Islanders head into 2024 in the thick of the mix. The first half of the season could have gone better. It could have gone worse.
The New York Islanders are about to embark on a weird phase of their 2023-24 regular season. After going 2-2-1 against the Hurricanes, Capitals and Penguins to close out the calendar year, the Isles now go West for a few games, come home for a couple more and then go to the Midwest for a week. All told, the Isles have 13 games in January and only three of them (Montreal, Florida and Toronto) are against Eastern Conference teams. They don’t play another divisional game until Feb. 18 when they play the New York Rangers in New Jersey.
There are 17 games between now and the Outdoor Game with the Blueshirts. That’s almost a quarter of the season during which the Isles will play a College Football-y non-conference schedule littered with unusual start times.
As they head to Colorado for the second leg of their current four-game road trip the Islanders are in a good-but-precarious position. We’d all take the Isles sitting in a playoff spot with the sixth-best points percentage in the Eastern Conference at the end of 2023, but there’s plenty of reasons to be terrified. At the top of my list is the state of the playoff race.
One thing that is always overlooked when pundits, chart-slingers and projectors make their season prediction is the state of the league ahead of any given campaign.
During the mini-era immediately after the pandemic it was clear the NHL was top-heavy. There were a lot of teams that wanted nothing to do with winning and that led to an imbalanced competition that featured haves and have-nots. Among the “Haves” were a few heavyweights with elite cores hitting their prime at the exact right time. The betting splits showed this to be true as favorites cleaned up in the post-COVID seasons.
Last season we saw the pendulum start to inch back towards parity. The cracks started to really fester in perennial contenders like the Penguins and Capitals, while the Lightning and Avalanche took steps back because they couldn’t keep their best players. This was supposed to open the door for a new class of heavyweights led by Toronto and Edmonton, but neither took the opportunity (imagine that).
Both of those teams were expected to have another real swing at it this year, along with everyone’s hobby teams the Carolina Hurricanes and New Jersey Devils, but it was clear that there was no runaway favorite in 2023-24. Every team had at least one serious, potentially fatal flaw.
Oh, and the Atlantic Division was supposed to face some sort of reckoning this year with Ottawa, Detroit and Buffalo putting pressure on the Bruins, Lightning, Leafs and Panthers. We’ll just punt that prediction down the road until next summer. “This is a vital season for the Sabres/Senators, Jeff. You just can’t waste another year.”
The lack of any clear-cut juggernauts, plus a smaller-than-usual group of tankers has turned this season into a Kentucky Derby. It’s a deep field and there will be plenty of deadbeats making a case for every team in the race. They can pick up the pieces if the favorites stumble. This team can take advantage if this other team starts slow.
The Islanders have done a good job of stalking the pace so far. They’ve had a lot of things to contend with — how many games have they had their best six defensemen in the lineup for? — but are still alive thanks to showstopping performances from their best players.
But as positive as the momentum was just a couple of days ago, things turned sour in a 1-2-0 stretch that featured two losses to one of the horses at the rear of the chasing pack. The Isles had a chance to throw buckets of cold water on the Pittsburgh Penguins, but instead offered them a helping hand and brought them into the thick of this playoff chase.
Adding to the chasing pack is the last thing we need when it already is complicated. This isn’t your older cousin’s playoff chase with a couple of overachieving teams and then one or two more middling ones.
This pack features three of the preseason Stanley Cup favorites (Carolina, New Jersey and Toronto), a team of stars at the end of its dynastic rope (Tampa Bay), Sidney Crosby and those lovable, class-act Penguins (aka Kyle Dubas’ Renaissance Painting), the underdogs (Philadelphia, Detroit and Washington for now) and the team everybody will root against or forget (Islanders).
It’s an absolute mess. It’s impossible to read. And because of the wonky upcoming schedule, it’ll require a ton of scoreboard watching while the Isles have an off-night in Winnipeg or wherever.
That started last night when I spent the final few hours of 2023 in bed, silently rooting like hell for the Calgary Flames to beat the Flyers.
Happy New Year. Love to the Family.