For The New York Islanders, Answers Are Coming To Long-Asked Questions

For 475 days now, the same questions have lingered over the Islanders.

Are they an imperfect but worthy Stanley Cup contender who developed championship mettle in extending the champion Lightning to six games in the 2020 bubble and suffering the narrowest of 1-0 defeats in the seventh game of a 2021 rematch against the eventual repeat winners — turning those Islanders, who would have been overwhelming favorites in the Stanley Cup Finals against the Canadiens, into the most agonizing case of a near-championship miss in New York since the Jets couldn’t finish off the Broncos in the 1998 AFC Championship Game?

“You can’t buy those kind of experiences and those kind of atmospheres and those kind of games,” Islanders center Mathew Barzal said Wednesday morning.

Or were their deep playoff runs a product of two of the flukiest seasons of all-time? A seven-game losing streak dropped the Islanders into ninth place in the Eastern Conference, one point out of the final playoff spot, when the pandemic ended the 2019-20 season. And they were solid if unspectacular during the 56-game 2021 season, when the Islanders finished fourth in the realigned East Division with the 12th-most points in the NHL.

Last season, when the NHL played an 82-game schedule for the first time since 2018-19, the Islanders finished with 84 points, 16 points out of the last wild card berth in the East.

Of course, that nightmarish season comes with questions of its own. What would have happened if the Islanders didn’t have to begin the season with a 13-game road trip as construction was completed on UBS Arena? What if a COVID-19 outbreak didn’t engulf the locker room at the end of the road trip, leading to a season-ruining 11-game losing streak for an undermanned club? What if leading scorers Barzal and Brock Nelson along with top-line defenseman Ryan Pulock hadn’t missed a combined 35 games due to injury?

Those questions will be joined by some new ones tonight, when the Islanders open the season at UBS Arena against the defending Presidents’ Trophy-winning Panthers — namely, this two-part query:

What if the issue last season just bad luck and the need for head coach offering a more offensively-minded voice — and what happens if that wasn’t the case?

General manager Lou Lamoriello went all-in with the Islanders’ core this summer, as he did following the 2019-20 and 2021 seasons. Johnny Gaudreau and Nazem Kadri, each of whom could have immediately ascended to the first line on a team that finished 24th in the NHL in scoring last season, signed with the Blue Jackets and Flames, respectively. The lone impact addition is defenseman Alexander Romanov, who was acquired from the Canadiens along with a fourth-round 2022 draft pick in exchange for the Islanders’ 2022 first-round pick.

Lamoriello surprisingly dropped his famous poker face for a moment in August, when he sounded energized by the task of convincing the skeptics following his static off-season.

“There’s no disappointment where we’re at, because we feel very good about who we are,” Lamoriello said. “We would have made drastic changes if we didn’t feel good about the group we have and what they’re capable of doing. I say that with comfortability, I say that with confidence and we’re looking forward to getting back at it and maybe proving everybody wrong.”

The other notable new face is behind the bench, where Lane Lambert takes over for the Hall of fame-bound Barry Trotz, who was fired shortly after the regular season ended. The Islanders, as is usually the case when a team changes coaches, spent most of training camp lauding the new guy’s approach, even if it sounds like a critique of the old guy.

But these are quite literally the same Islanders. They’re not going to flip a switch and become the fastest team east of the Rockies. As Lamoriello, the architect of the three-time champion Devils who turned a sludgy style into an art form, noted in August, this is still a team rooted in defense and structure.

“Our team is built a certain way,” Lamoriello said. “I don’t apologize for it. I’m a goal-differential type of a person.”

A new voice in Lambert, a little looser style of play and a better back end in front of potential franchise goalie Ilya Sorokin — the lone major departures from last year’s roster were defensemen Zdeno Chara and Andy Greene, each of whom were game but a step too slow in what turned out to be their final NHL seasons at ages 45 and 39, respectively — is going to have to be enough to lift the Islanders back into the thick of a typically loaded Metropolitan Division race.

Lamoriello was active ahead of the 2019-20 trade deadline and would likely be aggressive again if the Islanders give him a reason to believe they can get back to the playoffs, where the runs of 2020 and 2021 infused core players with the belief they’re a lot closer to finally raising that fifth Cup than either of the last two full-ish regular seasons would have indicated.

One way or the other, all the questions that have loomed over the Islanders since June 26, 2021 will be answered beginning tonight.

“Learned what it takes,” Barzal said. “Although we didn’t win, I genuinely believe we gave everything we had.

“And there was a reason why we got to that point.”