Of all the talking points off the Islanders’ season-opening loss, good or bad, the most important to their short-term prospects might be this: Old and slow no longer applies to this team.
That stigma was attached to the Islanders for just about the entire Lou Lamoriello era. Even when the Islanders were making playoff runs, they were doing so while turning their lack of speed and skill into an advantage, making themselves a bruising, imposing team to play against that thrived in the postseason when time and space got taken away. But when the core started to age, the ability to play that style stagnated, and old-and-slow became an outright liability, rather than a tradeoff the Islanders could compensate for elsewhere.
In recent years, if you watched the Islanders every night, it was sometimes a jarring experience to flip the channel to different teams. It was like listening to a podcast at 1.5 speed and needing to carefully listen to every word, lest you miss something.
Thursday was far from perfect, but that was no longer a reason why. If anything, the Islanders — for whom East/West was never in the vocabulary while Lamoriello was the general manager — were a little too horizontal and a little too dependent on the rush for chances in the 4-3 loss to the Penguins. For the time being, at least, these are good problems to have; an overcorrection is better than no change at all.
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