Islanders can’t skip the transition they desperately need

Evan Gold, the Islanders’ newly hired assistant general manager, dipped his toes into controversial waters last week. He did this by committing the time-honored public relations sin of telling the truth. 

“They’re a transitional team,” Gold said of the Islanders during an appearance on “The Sheet with Jeff Marek,” and the rest didn’t seem to matter much for a small-but-loud slice of the fanbase that was already upset at this acknowledgment of reality. 

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So here is some more reality, of which everyone in the organization and around the NHL is well aware. The Islanders have not won a playoff series since 2021. They had 91 points last season and missed the playoffs for a second consecutive season.

The best, most important assets in their organization are almost uniformly young enough to be in college, and 10 players enter training camp with expiring contracts, giving the Islanders an estimated $40 million in salary cap space going into next summer. 

Transition is not only an accurate word to describe this situation, it is a necessary state for the Islanders to be in right now, due mainly to the stagnant operation under the last few years of Lou Lamoriello’s reign, which left them stuck in the NHL’s middle ground, needing to rebuild their prospect pipeline and get out from under a series of bad contracts. 

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“To be a sustainable playoff team you can’t just patch every year and just bring one player here, one player there, you have to build it,” general manager Mathieu Darche told reporters a few days ago when asked about Gold’s comment. “But a good thing is, we have some solid veterans that can keep us relevant, keep us fighting for the playoffs as we incorporate and we always need to mix up both. You can’t win with only young guys, you can’t win with only older guys, so that’s the transitional part that he’s talking about.” 

When attendance dipped repeatedly, and fans who were at UBS Arena chanted for Lamoriello’s head, transition was — functionally — what they were asking for. You cannot get from where the Islanders were in 2025 to being an annual contender in one year, or even two, and the franchise’s solution to that problem under prior management was to insist that there was no problem at all. 

None of that is to absolve Darche for his own errors in the job, or to say that fans shouldn’t be disappointed over an offseason where waiting till next summer was the strategy, in function if not in name. 

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Even if you are bullish about the Islanders’ medium and long-term outlook, it’s hard not to feel bearish about the here and now. The end of last season left a bad taste, and this isn’t the first time in recent memory that the selling points heading into training camp are a full season of a new coach and the returns of players who were injured for most of last season.

Darche saying the Islanders can fight for the playoffs is a slight step down from his introductory press conference in May 2025, when he said he believed the Islanders could make the playoffs. 

Darche, though, was hired much more to make the Islanders better in the long haul than in the short term, and the same would have applied to any other candidate. On that front, the Islanders have rapidly turned their prospect pipeline around, made big steps in building a reputable AHL operation and made a series of front office hires to help areas like analytics and development, where the club had lagged behind the rest of the league. 

Gold, who had a successful run as an assistant general manager in Boston and was a finalist for general manager jobs in Vancouver and Toronto this summer, is, ironically, part of that list. 

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Whether all those seeds planted in the last 16 months pay off will be the defining question of Darche’s tenure as general manager — far more than trading for Brayden Schenn — and he won’t have unlimited time to wait and see.

A year from now, the expectation needs to be that the $40 million in waiting be put to good use, and that the prospects on whose development the franchise is staked be in position to contribute. The transitional phase, in short, needs to be winding down by training camp 2027. 

But right now, it’s where the Islanders are. That is plain to everyone who cares to look, and getting mad over honesty is a request to be sold a bill of goods.