The fact of the matter is that for the Islanders to achieve definitive progress, they will need to do something the franchise hasn’t done in more than two decades.
With their season opening Friday night in Newark against a Devils team that played Thursday night in Pittsburgh, the Islanders will begin to try to back up last season’s revitalizing run to the playoffs. It was on May 11 when the Penguins ousted them with a Game 6 overtime loss on the Coliseum ice, and it kept the season of 1993 as the most recent time the Islanders won a playoff series.
“You definitely have to earn everything you get to get back to the playoffs,” newly minted captain John Tavares said on Thursday, sitting in the same back-left corner of the dressing room where 146 days prior he stated that a first-round loss was not even close to his satisfaction. “Just because we were there doesn’t mean we’re going to get back in. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Work indeed.
Tavares admitted that in his previous lockout-shortened season, his team played well for “six to eight weeks” to get into the playoffs as the final seed in the East, and that it’s going to take a lot more consistency to achieve that same goal with the upcoming 82-game schedule.
“It’s going to take nine months, really, to get back there,” Tavares said. “To want to play for the Cup and go far in the playoffs, it’s a grind.”
It’s a grind no Islanders team since Patrick Flatley, Pierre Turgeon and Glenn Healy has been able to withstand. But when it comes for internal expectations for this current group, coach Jack Capuano is focused strictly on consistency of effort.
“It’s about work ethic,” said Capuano, who will become the only coach in franchise history besides Al Arbour to stay behind the bench for four or more seasons. “When you go back and look at the inconsistency that we had, it wasn’t the X’s and O’s part of it. It was about your battle level, about maintaining and how you defend.
“Everybody talks about winning the Stanley Cup. But for me, it’s maintaining our consistency, getting back to the dance and giving yourself a chance for your ultimate goal, which is winning the Stanley Cup.”
Rugged forward Cal Clutterbuck practiced with the team for the first time since suffering a leg laceration on Sept. 17 in the team’s first preseason game. Clutterbuck wore a non-contact black jersey and is on schedule to return sometime in the next one to three weeks.