A Reason To Believe

Lets travel back in time a few months. Go back to the end of September 2018. Its getting close to the start of the 2018-19 season for the National Hockey League. For the New York Islanders, there wasn't much to be optimistic about going into the beginning of the year. Now, here we sit on the first weekend in April, and those same New York Islanders are getting ready to face the Pittsburgh Penguins in the opening round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. After what this team went through last summer, this is a huge statement by management and the team.

Now I'll be the first one to admit to it, I didn't have a lot of hope for this season. Yes, it was great that they had brought in Lou to run the team and Barry to coach the club. It was a change of pace and I felt that those two guys could head the team in the right direction. Then, things seemed to fall apart. John Tavares decides to bolt the team and head for Toronto. Lots of people around the team (fans mostly) felt hurt by how that whole thing went down. And they have every right to with the way he went about it. But Lou and Barry got passed it and went right to work bringing in talent to try and replace his production. Valtteri Filppula, Leo Komorov, Robin Lehner and Luca Sbisa were all brought on board to try and make this team better.

The loss of Tavares could have been really damaging. Who was going to score? Could last year's Calder trophy winner Mat Barzal step up to fill the role of superstar? The answer was yes, to a degree. The fourth line killed it this year, with Casey Cizikas netting his first ever twenty goal season. He, along with Anders Lee and Brock Nelson where the only guys on this team to score twenty or more goals this year. They had five other players, Barzal, Josh Bailey, Jordan Eberle, Valtteri Filppula, and Anthony Beauvillier each score ten or more goals this season. It does show balanced scoring of this team.

What really turned out to be the backbone for this team was the goaltending. Robin Lehner and Thomas Greiss had allowed the fewest goals in the NHL this year at 196, the only team to allow less than 200 goals on the year, truly amazing when you think about it. This was a team who had allowed the most goals against in the league a season ago.

Now here comes the big question. Can they get it done in the playoffs? we will see in about two weeks. But that's not the big story. The big story here is the fact that this team got here. This team was given no hope with Tavares now north of the boarder. There was a lot of question marks going on with this team. They've managed to overcome it all and are now in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

This team believed in eachother. They manged to buy into the new system and are clicking at the right time. They know what they have to do. Job number one is complete. They proved a ton of people wrong my making the post season. That's just step one. Now its time to work on showing the rest of the league that this isn't a flash in the pan. Mission 16W starts now. Sixteen wins are needed top hoist the cup overhead. That begins Wednesday night.