New York Islanders are indeed this good (Trending Topics)

You would have to agree that over the last few weeks the New York Islanders have been more than a little bit lucky.

After all, no team is “win 10 games out of 11” good under normal circumstances, but here we are with them having done it. Further to that point, they've gone to overtime or a shootout in five of those games, and come out winners every time. So clearly, they're getting the bounces.

But having seen some stuff this week that expressed some amount of incredulity that the Islanders — the New York Islanders, for god's sake! — are currently sitting out point out of the top spot in the league, and tied for the largest point total in the Eastern Conference. This of course turns the hockey we've known it more or less since the turn of the century on its head, because as we all understand in our bones that the Islanders are meant to be the dross of the Metropolitan née Atlantic division.

They're current 16-6-0, nearly halfway to the entire wins total from all of last year (34) and looking extraordinarily likely to eclipse 40 wins for just the second time since the Second Bettman Lockout. At present, the club's .727 winning percentage in the regular season is second in franchise history behind only that “arguably the greatest team ever” 1981-82 club, which went .738. People, perhaps understandably, just can't square that with their perceptions, but it's important here to examine exactly why the Islanders are winning despite making relatively few changes in the lead-up to this extraordinary start to the season.

The first and most obvious change has come in net, because Garth Snow seems to have finally realized that having a good goaltender is good and having a bad one is bad. This would appear to be a simple enough concept but the fact is that it continues to escape many general managers despite the ready availability of good goaltenders on the market in any given year. The Islanders' years of getting sub-.900 team goaltending effectively ended when Evgeni Nabokov was told to pack his bags, and Jaroslav Halak brought in instead, for the criminally low price of a fourth-round pick and $4.5 million against the cap. Halak is currently delivering pretty obscene numbers (.923) but it's only five points above his career average, and thus doesn't seem too unsustainable. Put another way, even if he regresses to his career norms, he's still, A.) going to be very good, and B.) going to constitute such an upgrade over previous years in terms of the number of goals he prevents (between 20 and 25, or something like four or five wins) that his cap hit will pay for itself in wins multiple times over.

But you can't really go and mention the goaltending without talking about the way in which Snow upgraded his defense since the trade deadline. First, he tricked Philadelphia into taking Andy MacDonald, arguably the worst top-pairing defenseman in the league, off his hands (though it must be said that MacDonald is of course not a top-pairing defenseman and judging by his quality probably isn't even a second-pairing guy, but he's averaging more than 21 minutes a game with the Flyers, and pushed north of 23 with the Isles, so that's how he's used).

Then Snow waited in the weeds for the Bruins and Blackhawks to decide they had to '86' someone from their D corps to fit under the cap, and scooped up Johnny Boychuk (22 minutes and huge relative possession numbers against top competition) and Nick Leddy (better possession, slightly fewer minutes) for a combined price of three middling-to-inconsequential prospects, two second-round picks, and a conditional third. Both are playing together, in fact, and succeeding beyond reasonable expectation. But 20-plus games into the season together, and knowing what we know of their work in Boston and Chicago, there's no reason to think it's all that unsustainable.

Two defensemen like that shouldn't have cost Snow exactly no one from his NHL roster, and yet he played it smart by poaching from two over-bloated rosters. That's two quality depth defensemen to complement Travis Hamonic, and allow the team to not-overuse billion-year-old Lubomir Visnovsky. That also allowed them to do a better job of easing less experienced guys like Calvin de Haan (who's being used as a shutdown guy alongside Hamonic) and Thomas Hickey into the more prominent roles without basically throwing them to the wolves.

So in with those guys and out with MacDonald, yes, really did make that much of a difference. With this new second pairing, the Islanders attempt nearly 60 percent of the shots at 5-on-5, and outscore their opponents 2 to 1. With MacDonald last year, they took just 44.4 percent, and were outscored nearly 2 to 1. (And for the record, he's currently doing about the same for Philly.) Those two changes alone made that much of a difference.

Which is to say nothing of the Islanders' goals-per-game, which is currently fourth in the league. With new, better defensemen who don't get the team hemmed into its own zone for minutes at a time, and instead get the puck up the ice with expediency, guys like John Tavares and Kyle Okposo are flourishing in ways they simply couldn't before. The continued maturation of younger players like Anders Lee and Brock Nelson and Ryan Strome likewise help a lot as well.

Meanwhile, Snow's expensive high-profile new signings Mikhail Grabovski and Nikolay Kulemin have been proven to be possession drivers despite high-quality competition, allowing the team's two biggest stars to take easier assignments, and push them around a little more easily. While neither of the imports is scoring a lot — just eight goals and 20 points between them — they're making a difference in ways many likely wouldn't have expected if they subscribed to, say, the Torontonian view of Grabovski and Kulemin's play. If they really played Lone Wolf Hockey, their apparent willingness to play more shutdown roles would not actually exist.

You'll recall it wasn't so long ago that this team lost five games out of seven from Oct. 18 to Nov. 1, and despite the fact that they were 6-5-0, many people were wondering aloud whether changes needed to be made. No one is wondering that now, and given the way in which the roster has been put together and deployed, one might have to wonder whether Snow and Jack Capuano might be in line for a twin-bill executive and coach of the year awards. No one, certainly, has done more with the perception of less.

Let's put it another way: The Islanders last year were considered a disaster, with bad possession numbers and a little bit of bad luck mixed into a noxious brew of failure (49.5 CF%, 98.4 PDO). They only attempted about 55.5 shots per 60 minutes at 5-on-5, and allowed close to 56.6.

The Islanders this year are one of the best teams in the league, with great possession and a little bit less bad luck mixed into a rejuvenating tonic of success (55.5 CF%, 99.5 PDO). They're attempting 60.2 shots per 60 minutes at 5-on-5, and allowing just 52. And hey, their goaltending is actually good.

No team has transformed more in one offseason in recent memory than these Islanders, and they're not winning through the smoke-and-mirrors nonsense advanced by the Avs and Leafs of recent years. All their fundamentals — talent level, underlying numbers, etc. — are solid in every way you choose to examine them, indicating that they're probably going to be a top team in the East more or less for the remainder of the year barring a major setback, such as injury to a key player.

You can certainly stay fifth in possession numbers and 14th in PDO through a quarter of any given season through good luck and total accident, but I've seen enough Islander games at this point to believe this is real. Even if they stop winning all these overtime games and shootouts.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

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