ELMONT, N.Y. – A home locker room that had been as vibrant as any in the league for the majority of roughly the first six months of the National Hockey League season was as quiet as it gets upon entry on Sunday night.
It was an all too common theme over the last several weeks.
The New York Islanders, who were one of the best stories in hockey for a good chunk of the year thanks to both to their impressive resurgence and immediate feel-good story superstardom of their first overall pick, defenseman Matthew Schaefer, simply fell short late in the season and were eliminated from playoff contention in a 4-1 loss to the Montreal Canadiens in the penultimate game of the year.
Montreal scored three goals in a disastrous stretch of just 55 seconds — Nick Suzuki, Ivan Demidov and Alex Newhook did the damage — in the second period that put the final nail in the coffin.
Losses in six of their last seven games in which they were outscored by a combined 27-11 ultimately doomed them in a competitive Eastern Conference, one that will find itself without the Islanders, New York Rangers or New Jersey Devils represented in the postseason for the first time ever since the latter franchise moved to the Garden State in 1982.
The Rangers woefully underperformed again and sold off some of their best pieces prior to the trade deadline.
The Devils season was essentially lost when Jack Hughes got hurt again, leading to the dismissal of GM Tom Fitzgerald and some likely significant changes this offseason.
Neither of those, ultimately, were surprising.
But the Islanders? It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Not with being buyers at the trade deadline and shipping off their first-round pick for Brayden Schenn. Not with Schaefer seemingly being well on his way to a Calder Trophy as the league’s top rookie. Not with Ilya Sorokin putting up stretches where he was in the conversation as one of the best netminders in the league.
Not even when the panic button was fully pressed with four games left in the season and head coach Patrick Roy was replaced by Pete DeBoer.
So how did we possibly get here?
“It’s obviously a pretty crappy feeling right now,” said Islanders forward Bo Horvat. “At the end of the day, we need to put the puck in the net, including myself, in order to win hockey games, and we couldn’t do it down the stretch here…it sucks. We put ourselves in that spot all year, but down the stretch here when it really mattered and we needed to get the wins, we just didn’t get the job done. It’s on us in this room. We’ve got to learn from it and try to get better next year.”
Captain Anders Lee echoed some similar sentiments.
“We just kind of faltered towards the end here,” he said. “You need a few more points, and every team can look back at games they should have won and whatnot, but those are the ones that hurt you the most…there’s not a lot of words on how I feel right now and how the group feels. We came up short after putting everything we had towards getting in this year, and for the most part, we were in a playoff position and put ourselves in a great spot at the deadline.
“We did everything we could to succeed. We faltered in some games, we lost some games late in games, and we missed out on a few points and put ourselves in a spot where we had to win four in a row at the end…it’s a lot to think about, a lot to wrap our heads around right now. It sucks, it (freaking) sucks. We’re disappointed in it.”
There was no definitive, collective answer given on the how and the why, however, with things likely too fresh to process. Several players dismissed the thought of it being a potential confidence issue for the group — veteran Casey Cizikas was among them, while stopping himself short of going into details on where things went wrong — but there’s certainly been some discussion on it being a team that simply ran out of gas, with a late-season dip in play for the 18-year-old Schaefer in his first pro year and Sorokin being overplayed due to a rough stretch of games over the last few months for pending unrestricted free agent backup David Rittich.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter now, as the franchise starts to look ahead to a future that still feels bright.
“It’s a team game, and we want to go far, and we want to be in the playoffs,” Schaefer said. “These couple games mattered, and it’s not the outcome we wanted, but we’re going to learn from it and move on.”
Schaefer will inarguably be one of those franchise cornerstone-type building blocks who will be moving forward, but there may be some changes ahead with an aging core group, particularly with questions about the exceptionally popular Lee, a community staple who has played all 922 of his career NHL games with the Islanders, as he heads into this offseason as a UFA at 35 years old having wrapped up a seven-year, $49-million contract.
The team DeBoer got thrust into coaching at the end of this year may look very different at the start of next, but the head start he got may prove to be valuable if his new team hopes to avoid a similar fate in 2026-27.
“I can tell you I’m going to be way ahead of where I would have been had I come in in the summer for sure,” he said. “Is (this stretch) enough time to have all the answers, no. But, I’ve got a lot more answers than I would have showing up here in training camp without having this experience with this group. I’m excited to start fresh and have a camp and get to work with them…there’s some exciting pieces here, but there’s no doubt we have a lot of work left to do.”