NHL

Islanders know playoff return won’t be easy

Sitting on a dais in Brooklyn on Thursday, Islanders coach Jack Capuano made a passing statement that was overlooked amid the lights and glamour of his team’s future home at Barclays Center.

Just months after breaking the franchise’s five-year postseason drought, Capuano made it clear if the Islanders do not improve, they will get passed by those around them and last season quickly will become a distant and foregone memory.

“I’m not going to name teams, but if you look at the teams that missed the playoffs last year, come [free agency starting on] July 5, they made a lot of acquisitions,” Capuano said. “We didn’t do a whole lot. We felt comfortable with our team going in, but it’s going to be harder than you think.”

On Friday, Capuano took to the ice with his team back at its normal practice home in Syosset on Long Island, and familiar faces abound. Yet the coach reiterated that familiarity cannot breed complacency, otherwise the lack of offseason moves by the front office would seem like a shortsighted mistake.

“Maybe if we didn’t make it [to the postseason], we wouldn’t have sat around on July 5, maybe there would have been some holes for us,” said Capuano, whose team took the No. 1-seeded Penguins to six games in the first round. “It’s going to be tough, it’s going to be hard. They know that. We’ve talked about it.”

The only significant additions the Islanders made were forwards Pierre-Marc Bouchard, Cal Clutterbuck and Peter Regin. All three have begun camp skating with the first group of veterans, yet it’s mostly Bouchard, penciled in alongside John Tavares on the top line, who could make a major difference. Clutterbuck and Regin are third- and fourth-line role players, and though they’re good at their jobs, they don’t exactly match the big-ticket acquisitions of other teams in the newly formed Metropolitan Division.

Most notable is the Flyers, who signed defenseman Mark Streit, the Islanders captain last season, as well as four-time All-Star center Vinny Lecavalier. Across the river, the Devils might have lost Ilya Kovalchuk, but they have a revamped roster ready to regain their accustomed spot in the postseason.

“Something you realize is that it’s not going to get easier from one year to the next,” Islanders winger Matt Moulson said Friday. “You ask every team if they think they got better, and 95 percent to 100 percent of them will say yes.”

That means the Islanders who were here last season are not exactly relying on reinforcements. The coaching staff and the front office are relying on internal improvement as the league no longer looks at them as a doormat.

“I don’t think teams will take you lightly anymore,” Capuano said. “Not that anyone took us lightly, but I think some of our younger guys started to develop [last season]. Other teams got better and we have to get better, too.”