If you were on social media anytime Thursday, you would’ve noticed a lot of teams around the NHL doing bag skates.
If you were around the Islanders this time last season, you would’ve noticed Lane Lambert doing the same.
So by that standard, Day 1 of Patrick Roy’s training camp was unremarkable.
But Mat Barzal was never doubled over looking gassed after training camp a year ago.
On Thursday, other Islanders took solace in the fact that Barzal — who thrives on these days of endless skating — was just as exhausted as the rest of them.
“I loved it,” Roy said after the third 90-minute session of a grueling first day of camp wrapped up. “They knew they were going to work, and they did. And that’s exactly what I was looking for.”
Much was made when Roy was hired in January about his setting a new tone.
The Islanders, through a combination of inertia and Lambert simply being ill-fitted as a head coach, had gotten too passive in their game and far too easy to play against.
That changed enough to get them into the playoffs, but everyone involved acknowledges a major midseason overhaul was not, in a perfect world, how things would have happened.
Roy’s first training camp and his first full season behind the bench is a better chance to see his impact in full, though if last year was a half-measure, it was a pretty good one.
As camp opened Thursday, it looked like a practice focused not just on endurance but physicality.
Before they did the skating drills that left them keeled over, the Islanders focused mainly on one-on-one battles and “second quick,” Roy’s term for defensive support.
“Honestly you can’t be ready for it, even if you practice, if you’re skating like that all summer long,” Alexander Romanov said. “Before [doing suicides], we spent one hour doing one-on-one battles, so you can be prepared for everything.
“You should be tired. This is a goal of this practice: to make you tired and prepare you for the next game, which is gonna be this Sunday [against the Devils]. It’s just a short gap between practice and the game. We should prepare ourselves.”
Noah Dobson, after taking 30 seconds to catch his breath, concurred.
“It’s what you expect,” he said. “Day 1’s always tough. Doesn’t matter how hard you train, what you do in the summer, you can’t match that intensity. That’s the biggest adjustment.”
This is about figuring out the roster. It is also about creating a new standard — not merely reenforcing one.
The coming days, in that sense, are more important than the first.
On the ice from Long Island
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If Roy feels the need to bag skate the team in February again, that’s a sign that whatever they did in September didn’t take.
One thing that hasn’t changed since Barry Trotz arrived in 2018: The Islanders are not going to win a Stanley Cup by sheer force of scoring and skill.
That is not to diminish the roster — which has, in fact, grown in those aspects over the past couple seasons — but to say the team’s heart and soul is still about dirt and grime.
This must be a roster that embraces hard work and fundamentals all 82 nights, otherwise the Islanders are set to play out a bad sequel.
That, the entire dressing room would tell you, is just how they like it. Roy will force them to prove those words.
“We want to raise the bar, there’s no doubt about it,” Roy said. “There’s no better way to do it than right at Day 1. Set the tone for training camp. We want to use this training camp to set a tone for the start of our season.”
