TORONTO — The Islanders, as close to a whole product as they can get while Mat Barzal is hurt, looked like a better, faster, more competitive team Wednesday night than they had in a preseason that verged on alarming.
Just not better, faster or competitive enough.
For the fifth time in six years, the Islanders started their season with a defeat, falling to the Maple Leafs 2-1, opening 2026-27 with a performance that reinforced their defensive issues.
It wasn’t all bad at Scotiabank Arena. But the good for the Islanders was almost exclusively limited to when Matthew Schaefer was on the ice, and that is a problem anyone could have predicted.
Schaefer, who was part of the headline bill against this year’s No. 1 overall pick Gavin McKenna, picked up right where he left off last season, his adjustment to the right side looking far more seamless than McKenna’s to the NHL.
Adam Pelech and Schaefer aside, though, the other two defense pairs looked like works in progress at best.
As was the case in preseason, the Alexander Romanov-Ryan Pulock pair was consistently hemmed in. Logan Stanley, making his Islanders debut alongside Tony DeAngelo, looked like he was still getting his bearings — and was victimized on the Leafs’ opening goal, when Colton Sissons beat him to Nick Paul’s feed for a successful redirection.
Five minutes after Sissons opened the scoring, the Leafs doubled their lead on the power play. Morgan Rielly batted the puck to keep it in off Ryan Pulock’s clearing attempt and Easton Cowan cleaned up the garbage on the ensuing blast from Jack Roslovic.
As for Victor Eklund, Leafs coach Jim Hiller threw a huge test at the young Swede right away, matching Auston Matthews’ line against the rookie’s trio that included JG Pageau and Emil Heineman.
That made for an underwhelming night for Eklund, though he was far from the only one.
The second line was barely noticeable aside from Cal Ritchie’s struggles, and by late in the second period, Pete DeBoer had moved Anthony Duclair — perhaps the Islanders’ best offensive forward on the night — into Matias Maccelli’s spot, demoting the latter to the fourth line.
Shortly thereafter, DeBoer put the entire lineup in the blender, hoping to spark it in the third period. Ironically, when the Islanders did get on the board, it was shorthanded, with Emil Heineman finishing off a 2-on-1 rush with Bo Horvat at 14:09 of the third.
Cutting the deficit to 2-1 with nearly six minutes to go gave the Islanders the opportunity they’d been looking for all night. But they couldn’t use it to squeeze out a point.
There were stretches, amid a game that wasn’t all that open, when the Islanders created extended pressure and forced Anthony Stolarz into action. While the power play looked just as bad as it did last season, with an 0-for-4 performance that made it culpable, you could at least squint at parts of the 5-on-5 game and see building blocks.
Duclair, specifically, looked like the best version of himself, and had the Islanders’ best chance of the night when he skated across the crease and forced Stolarz to stretch all the way out to make a save in the third.
Still, there wasn’t much activity in the crease, multiple lines were held quiet and the power play was deficient. The blue-line issues are glaring too.
The Islanders have the best young defensemen in the whole sport in Schaefer. Behind him, though, their defensemen need to be much, much better.
