The Islanders’ advanced numbers paint them as a team that, if not for its goaltending and luck, would be in the bottom third of the league.
Now, the Islanders’ five-on-five play is not quite so bad as to suggest anything so drastic. Public analytics models are flawed, and the Islanders are a better team than they were last season, despite a slightly worse five-on-five expected goals rate. Their defensemen are emboldened to get involved in the play. Mathew Barzal looks like himself. They are playing much better, more confident offensive hockey and showing an ability to take the game to their opponents that did not exist a season ago.
But it’s unambiguously true that Ilya Sorokin is covering up a lot of issues within this team. You only need to look to Tuesday’s loss to St. Louis, on a night where Sorokin was not quite himself, to see that.
The Islanders on Tuesday outshot St. Louis, 40-28, with a 35-24 margin at five-on-five. They had the better of high-danger chances, 21-15, and expected goals, 3.74-2.71, at five-on-five, per Natural Stat Trick. And they lost, 7-4, with the last two Blues goals being empty-netters.
Why?
Because for the first time in nearly a month, Sorokin could not bail them out. That in part comes down to his giving up an easy goal to Colton Parayko that he’d surely like to have back. But the first three goals Sorokin allowed were grade-A chances — two two-on-one rushes and a Ryan O’Reilly rebound after he stopped the initial shot from point-blank range. On a regular night, maybe Sorokin stops a couple of those. But most goalies don’t, and the Isles are in a position where anything less than a fantastic performance in nets can cost them two points.
There’s no shame in relying on goaltending to win games, and Zach Parise was correct Tuesday night when he said Sorokin and Semyon Varlamov “have been probably the best tandem in the league the entire year.” The Isles are built to win that way. If they are still playing games deep into May, it will be because of their goaltending.
Still, it tells you something that even with the current Vezina Trophy favorite and perhaps the league’s best 1B goaltender in Varlamov, the Isles are entering a pair of pivotal weekend games as only the first wild-card team in the East, playing .537 hockey.
As currently constructed, the Isles are good enough to make the playoffs. But they don’t look good enough to do much once they get there.
How to fix it?
Offensively, there is not enough firepower up front, as evidenced by the massive proportion of goals scored by Islanders defensemen. That is solvable via trade, and the eventual return of Kyle Palmieri to the lineup won’t hurt either.
Defensively, though, it’s hard not to be concerned. The Islanders give up a lot of chances from the slot area, and have not quite figured out how to play aggressively while preventing enough odd-man rushes to make Sorokin’s life easier. It won’t help that Adam Pelech, their best and most reliable defensive player on the blueline, suffered what appeared to be a head injury against St. Louis.
Puzzling out a solution here is difficult, but it should start with ending the experiment of switching up the bottom two pairs. Scott Mayfield and Alexander Romanov had an abysmal game Tuesday and were on the ice together for the first three Blues goals — it was frankly surprising to see them still together in the third period. According to Natural Stat Trick, their 42.41 expected goals rate is the worst of any pairing with more than 100 minutes for the Islanders. Sebastian Aho and Noah Dobson’s 44.27 xGF% is not much better.
Breaking up Pelech and Ryan Pulock (if Pelech does not miss extended time, at least) should be out of the question. That leaves Lane Lambert to revert to the pairs that played together for much of the early going and hope Dobson and Romanov can find some chemistry. For what it’s worth, it was always hard to see anything else as the outcome — the Islanders have staked too much on both players to have either on the bottom pair.
If Pelech is out for a period of time, then this gets complicated.
Would the Isles bring up Robin Salo to compensate and deal with either him or Aho in the left-handed spot on the second pair? Would they try to play a right-hander on the left side? Would Grant Hutton, a righty, get the first look on the bottom pair with Aho, so the Isles could stack their top four with Romanov, Dobson, Pulock and Mayfield — a foursome that would require someone to play on his wrong side? And if you really want to go nuts, what about Samuel Bolduc, the 2019 second-round pick and lefty who currently has 19 points in 21 games at AHL Bridgeport?
All of these answers are varying degrees of imperfect, though the first might be the path of least resistance. Pelech is one of the players the Isles could least afford to lose, particularly with the Devils, Hurricanes and Bruins next on the schedule.
The silver lining
It’s important to keep in mind the Islanders are not a finished product, or at least they shouldn’t be. They will have significant salary-cap space at the trade deadline, and the roster should look different from March onward. It is OK to have flaws now, even big ones.
The Isles are not the most asset-rich team in the league, but they do have their first- and second-round picks in each of the next three drafts and some compelling prospects in William Dufour and Aatu Räty. Another quiet trade deadline would be stunning.
What the Islanders can’t afford to do is fall out of the race before they have a chance to make a deal. So far, so good — even with a disappointing handful of games lately. The parallels between the Islanders and last season’s Rangers are striking, though the Isles’ power play is nowhere near the level of that group’s.
That team survived on goaltending and special teams until general manager Chris Drury went out and remade the roster in March. One conference finals berth later, the Rangers are experiencing firsthand what can happen when otherworldly goaltending reverts to merely average. There are abundant lessons there for the Islanders, if they choose to take them.