A little more than a week into this offseason, the Islanders already can claim with some credibility that it is their best offseason since 2018 and maybe even their best under Lou Lamoriello, period.
After all, 2018 looks a lot better in retrospect than it did at the time, when John Tavares spurned the Islanders to sign for seven years and $77 million with the Maple Leafs. With the benefit of hindsight, Lamoriello handled that departure about as well as possible, building a roster that quickly transitioned into a competitor in the Eastern Conference by signing Robin Lehner and trading for Matt Martin, hiring a future Jack Adams winner in Barry Trotz and drafting Noah Dobson, among other moves.
Tavares, meanwhile, has produced at a high level, but has won just a single playoff series with the Leafs. Perhaps staying with the Islanders would have raised the club’s ceiling that little bit higher between 2018-21, but it’s difficult to view the way things have gone for him in Toronto as a success.
With the benefit of hindsight, 2018 looks like the best offseason of Lamoriello’s tenure, and the general trend is that it’s gotten worse as time has gone on.
The inertia of 2022 and 2023 — when Julien Gauthier was the only player signed to a one-way deal in free agency across both seasons, the team did not make a first-round pick, Alexander Romanov was the only lineup regular brought in (Hudson Fasching eventually joined the fray as a successful two-way signing) and Trotz was fired to make way for Lane Lambert — was as bad as those initial years were good.
It’s far too early to judge the 2024 summer, and even though the Islanders are likely done making headline-grabbing moves, they are not done.
They still need resolution on restricted free agents Oliver Wahlstrom and Simon Holmstrom; there are still potential extensions to sign for Dobson, Romanov, Brock Nelson and Kyle Palmieri; Cal Clutterbuck and Matt Martin look unlikely to return, but remain unsigned; and who knows whether Lamoriello can pull a trade out of his hat.
Even with a sense of incompleteness, though, this is an offseason during which Lamoriello raised his team’s floor and (assuming Martin and Clutterbuck go elsewhere) changed the makeup of the room after committing to do so.
It’s not particularly dramatic, but it is a shakeup.
Signing Anthony Duclair and Maxim Tsyplakov nudged the roster in the right direction. Making a high-ceiling first-round pick in Cole Eiserman was crucial to rebuilding the pipeline. And moving on from assistant coach Doug Houda was necessary after the way the penalty kill played last season. Getting three years at the league minimum on an extension for Kyle MacLean was also a handy piece of business.
All of that likely makes the Islanders a better team.
It would be bordering on extreme optimism, however, to say it makes them a Cup contender.
This is still a lineup that’s missing a top-six winger, there are still big questions about the special teams and any hope of the Islanders resembling a real contender is entirely contingent on Ilya Sorokin turning in a Vezina-caliber season.
The next hinge point
As things stand, the Islanders look like a team that will spend the first few months of the season figuring out whether to be buyers or sellers at the trade deadline.
Unless a pathway to a trade opens up during the offseason or Lamoriello bites the bullet and signs Nelson and Palmieri to extensions, that’s where things are going. Those two, plus Fasching and Mike Reilly, are set to enter next season with a year left before hitting unrestricted free agency. Anders Lee and Jean-Garbriel Pageau will have two years to go.
In other words, if the Islanders don’t look like contenders when the calendar flips to 2025, they should have ample room to maneuver in what would be a fairly major retool.
That, of course, would not be management’s preference. And if things go right over the first few months of the season, the reverse would apply: The Islanders have draft picks and prospects they could move, and the expiring contracts lend themselves to a trade.
The advantage of where the Islanders sit now is that they can be flexible.
Over the past couple seasons, when even a retool was virtually impossible given their cap table, the Isles were consigned to try and maximize what they had, even when they didn’t look like a Cup contender. That is no longer the case.
Exit Ruslan Iskhakov
The Post confirmed on Wednesday a report out of Russia that Ruslan Iskhakov is signing with CSKA Moscow in the KHL.
There were rumors of this during the regular season, and after Iskhakov made his NHL debut and failed to impress, it appeared a little unlikely that he would be back with the Islanders. He wanted something the organization couldn’t give him.
At training camp, Iskhakov talked about wanting to make the team. That obviously didn’t happen, and the Islanders didn’t even call him up until a meaningless Game 82 of the regular season. When he did get in, Iskhakov didn’t do enough to dispel the most important concern with his game — that his size would be a major liability in the NHL.
If the Islanders thought he could have played a role in the NHL next season, there was ample room to slot him into the depth chart this offseason.
It’s pretty unlikely that Iskhakov, who played college hockey in the U.S. and speaks English without an accent, is going to Russia out of homesickness.
This is a matter of having a better opportunity there than here.
