ICYMI: Check out Chris Botta’s feature on 1983 Islanders draft pick Peter McGeogh, whose hockey career was cut short by a catastrophic injury just as it was beginning.
Good Morning, Islanders Country.
Through five games, the Islanders haven’t done much to shake the label that probably followed them into the season.
Perfectly mediocre.
They’ve looked very good at times. Bad at others. And for long stretches, exactly average. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been encouraging signs.
If this team is going to make the playoffs, it won't be enough for Ilya Sorokin to be elite, Matthew Schaefer to look generational, and Bo Horvat to play like a No. 1 center. They were going to need help from everywhere.
So far, some of it has come from the places you least expected.
Ondrej Palat, written off by plenty of people, has given them something. Anthony Duclair has looked much more like the player they thought they were getting two years ago. (More on them later). Logan Stanley felt like an emergency signing when it happened, yet he's played better than you’d expect from a guy who was still available in the final week before the season.
That’s the good.
The rest is why we’re still talking about average.
Kyle Palmieri is still working his way back from ACL surgery and doesn’t quite look like himself. J.G. Pageau and Simon Holmstrom haven’t been consistent enough. Ryan Pulock and Adam Pelech haven’t looked as sharp as they did a year ago. Semyon Varlamov has played in just one game.
So here they are.
Not bad. Not great. Good enough to make you think they could be a playoff team, inconsistent enough to remind you why nobody is convinced.
That’s probably where they’ll live for a while.
How they get from here to wherever they finish?
That’s the interesting part.
