Happy New Year, Islanders Country 🍾
Unlike some recent losses, the Islanders didn’t give you much to complain about besides the final result yesterday afternoon. Still, the team finds itself in a telling and uneasy predicament, in which they lost a game to a better team on the road and came out feeling pretty good about their performance.
"I thought we played a good game," Patrick Roy said after the 3-1 loss to Toronto. "To be a great game we have to win, but I thought we played a good game. We had a lot of chances, we didn't give them much. That was a hard-fought; both teams played well. We had our chances to score goals, and we did not."
Those comments echo familiar statements Roy made during the first quarter of the year when the season still felt early. The prevailing thought and consistent message was that the team was playing better than its record indicated and that things would start to even out over time. They haven’t.
The idea that is team is playing well, but the recipient of bad luck no longer the case, and even if it was, it doesn’t mean much 38 games into a season that increasingly feels like it’s slipping away.
The Isles finished 2024 with a 36-34-14 record in 84 games for 86 points. It's a mediocre, murky middle type of record that accurately reflects the product we’ve watched on the ice. The team will have to be much better than that in early 2025 for there not to be wholesale changes by the time the 2025-26 season starts.
