Who had Dean Evason (Wild) and Jay Woodcroft (Oilders) fired before Islanders head coach Lane Lambert in a season that is only a quarter old? (Show of hands, please. Didn’t think so.) But that doesn’t mean Lambert will survive the season.
Somehow, Lambert avoided being the first head coach fired in the 2023 season. He was so close after the Islanders almost went through a winless Western Canada/Seattle trip. He avoided it when the Islanders got a 5-4 victory against the Calgary Flames in a shootout. Then, NYI managed to win three, but now they’ve lost two in a row, including a 5-4 loss to the Devils on Tuesday night at Prudential Center after blowing a 4-2 lead.
It doesn’t get any easier as they go on a two-game road trip to play the Carolina Hurricanes and defending Eastern Conference champion Florida Panthers this week.
By that time, we might be talking about a new head coach. While Lambert knows as much as any hockey coach, coaches get fired when a team fails to meet expectations, and his boss, Lou Lamoriello, has been known to fire coaches on a whim.
I spoke to several Islanders fans at Newark Penn Station at the Islanders’ tilt against the Devils, and several expressed frustration about the team’s downward state. They told me that Lambert and Lamoriello should both be fired.
And why not? Fans know a bad product when they see it. This Islanders team is a mess all around. Most often, they play without grit or intelligence. Moreover, they’ve blown third-period leads nine times this season. The penalty kill has been atrocious. The team does not play with structure and discipline.
Lambert has to be held accountable.
Look, no one expected this team to be a Stanley Cup contender. They’re not good enough as they are old and slow, and those issues are on Lamoriello because roster management is his job. That said, the head coach bears responsibility for how recklessly the Islanders play. Consider this. During last Saturday’s 1-0 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers at UBS Arena, the Islanders tossed the puck around rather than using the proper offensive attack to score.
Lambert offers no answers as to why his team continually finds ways to lose games. All he keeps saying is that they have to play better.
Firing Lambert will not make the Islanders a Stanley Cup contender again, but at least the new head coach will have them playing the right way and with energy again. A jolt could be just what’s needed for the underachieving players.
This is what we call desperate times, calling for desperate measures.
One reason is that it seems like the players are not listening to Lambert anymore. Once that happens, it becomes a lost cause for the head coach. They can say all the right things about Lambert, but their play tells a different story. The type that gets the attention of Islanders owners Jon Ledecky and Scott Malkin. Ownership has to know the fans are unhappy with their team. How could they not? There were chants of Fire Lamoriello and Fire Lambert recently at UBS Arena.
The bottom line is obvious: not a single player is playing well, and that includes Mathew Barzal, Bo Horvat, Brock Nelson, Anders Lee, Jean-Gabriel Pageau, Pierre Engvall, Casey Cizikas, Noah Dobson, Alexander Romanov, and Kyle Palmieri. Just as bad is that younger players–Oliver Wahlstrom, Sebastian Aho, and Samuel Bolduc–have failed to develop.
As the saying goes, you can’t fire the players, so the head coach tends to be sacrificed. The best that the new head coach can do is provide organization and leadership for the struggling players. That would be an improvement from what we’ve seen.
The 8-7-6 Islanders (22 points) play the Carolina Hurricanes tonight. NYI trails the second-place Hurricanes by only four points in the Metropolitan Division. That means something important: as bad as the Islanders have played, they are not far off. But to gain momentum, yhey can’t keep on “getting by.”
If this team doesn’t improve this week (Hurricanes tonight, Panthers on Saturday), I say it’s time to hire a new coach. Otherwise, there’s a good chance this season will turn into a lost cause.
