I am not going to sugarcoat it. July 1st has been a haunting date for the New York Islanders and its fan base over the past two summers.
Over the NHL All-Star Weekend in 2018, John Tavares temporarily shut down rumors regarding his upcoming free-agency by expressing his desire to re-sign with the New York Islanders. Fast forward approximately five months to July 1st, Tavares was introduced as the newest member of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Betrayal, disappointment, and frustration are words indicative of only a fraction of the emotions felt throughout the Islanders Faithful. It will undoubtedly go down as one of the most forgetful days in Islanders’ history.

Fast forward 364 days to June 30, 2019, the Islanders fan base experienced a new wave of excitement. After a year in which the organization proved its bright future, TSN Hockey Insider Bob McKenzie put out a tweet indicating that the Islanders were the favorites to sign superstar Artemi Panarin. Less than 24 hours later, déjà vu struck the Islanders Faithful. Not only did Panarin pass on the Islanders, but he signed with the Islanders’ archrival, the New York Rangers, for less money than the Islanders offered him.
Two of the league’s best players are now playing for teams competitive with the Islanders. That said, would it be crazy to argue that the Islanders are better off without them? Let’s find out.
One significant factor that separates championship teams from merely competitive teams is the timeline of the core players; ideally, for a team to maximize its potential, its top players would peak at approximately the same time. One of the main reasons the Pittsburgh Penguins have won three Stanley Cups since the 2005 NHL Draft is the similarity in age among the three most valuable players on the team. Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and Kris Letang were all drafted within a two-year span, so they all hit their prime and peaked around the same time. Similarly, the Chicago Blackhawks won three Stanley Cups in five years at the beginning of the decade partly because their two most valuable players, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, were born less than seven months apart, allowing them to peak around the same time. If Crosby, Malkin, and Letang were all drafted five years apart or if Toews and Kane were drafted ten years apart, for instance, who knows how many Stanley Cups the Penguins and Blackhawks would have won over the past fifteen years? Now, let’s look to see how Panarin and Tavares would have fit into the Islanders’ plans for the future.
Over the few months before the pandemic temporarily terminated play in the NHL, the Islanders were losing their identity as a team. For the Islanders to have a legitimate shot at the Stanley Cup in the near future, they likely would need to win through their somewhat-lost identity of offensive upside, combined with elite defense and goaltending, the identity that carried them to a top-five record in the NHL last season. Furthermore, the best chance the Islanders have of regaining this identity consequently is if defensemen Ryan Pulock and Adam Pelech can continue to shut down opposing top lines, elite prospect Ilya Sorokin can come to the NHL and emerge as one of the league’s best goaltenders, and Mathew Barzal can continue to drive the offensive play for the Islanders’ top line and power play. Most importantly, these players provide the Islanders with their most essential opportunity to achieve success primarily because they are all within a two-year age range, just as Toews and Kane were for the Blackhawks and Crosby, Malkin, and Letang were for the Penguins in their respective dynasties.

Each of these four key players for the future of the Islanders is between 23 and 25 years of age. Just for some perspective, currently, Panarin and Tavares are 28 and 29 years of age, respectively. In other words, Panarin and Tavares would have been on a slightly different timeline than the rest of the elite players on the Islanders.
This is not to say that Panarin and Tavares would have not had a significant impact on the Islanders at the beginning of their contracts. Tavares was the heart and soul of the organization for nine seasons, and he got only better in his first season with the Maple Leafs. Panarin even led all NHL skaters in Goals Above Replacement (GAR) this season. However, the reality is that the Islanders are not true Stanley Cup Contenders now. The team does not have enough key players to piece together a consistent playoff run, as further emphasized by their playoff performance last season, and one player, although an excellent player, would have immense difficulty completely changing the narrative of an organization. Furthermore, even if Panarin and Tavares were on the Islanders, it seems as if the team lacks enough depth to contend now. After all, they were never even close to winning a Stanley Cup in Tavares’ nine-year tenure on the Islanders.
Nonetheless, the Islanders are very capable of contending in the near future. If Sorokin comes over to play next season and Noah Dobson and Oliver Wahlstrom develop as the Islanders expect them to, the Islanders will need only a few more years to construct an extremely deep lineup. That said, how much would Panarin and Tavares truly help the Islanders by the time the Islanders are ready to contend?
Figure 1 portrays the age distribution of the top 310 skaters this season in terms of GAR- an average of ten of the best players on each team- in order to get a sense of the most common ages of the top players in the NHL today. As evidenced by Figure 1, NHL skaters tend to peak around ages 24 to 26, while the ages slightly below and above the range corresponding to a plethora of valuable players as well. Nevertheless, there is an awfully steep decline as the players approach and exceed thirty. If it takes the Islanders only two seasons to become true Stanley Cup contenders, Panarin and Tavares will both be in their thirties and on the decline in terms of impact. In other words, their impact now will not equate to their impact in a few years, so they are truly on a different timeline than the Islanders’ core pieces.

Figure 1
Another essential factor in this equation is payroll. The Islanders offered both Tavares and Panarin contracts with an average annual value of at least $11 million, a significant share of the Islanders’ payroll. Since July 1, 2018, the Islanders have re-signed Brock Nelson, Anders Lee, Jordan Eberle, and Anthony Beauvillier, and they still have to re-sign Barzal, Pulock, and Devon Toews this offseason. Additionally, the Islanders traded for and signed Jean-Gabriel Pageau at the trade deadline this season. Although they would have added a top forward in the NHL, who knows how many key pieces would leave or would have left the Islanders if they had signed Tavares or Panarin?
The future is bright on the Island, and that is something that I, among many other Islanders fans, never expected to say two years after Tavares broke all of our hearts to live out his childhood dream. However, the keyword in the last sentence is “future.” The Islanders are not a Stanley Cup contender now, but they can be in the near future. The clock is ticking for Tavares and Panarin as they both are near thirty years of age. They are valuable pieces to their respective organizations now, but there are legitimate reasons to doubt the extent to which they will perform even close to the level their contracts expect them to as they seek to contend in the next half-decade. Tavares was a childhood hero of mine and so many other young Islanders fans’, and Panarin on Barzal’s wing would have been must-see television, but believe it or not, for the next decade of Islanders hockey, it seems as if the Islanders are better off without them.

Aidan Resnick

Aidan is a freshman at the University of Chicago, studying data science and business economics, and an aspiring sports analyst. In 2019, he attended the Wharton Moneyball Academy, the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference, and the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, experiences that inspired him to pursue sports analytics. Aidan’s passion for sports analytics is best represented in his newest sports analytics book, “The Stats Game,” where he illuminates statistical tools and debunks myths in sports analytics, as well as in his victorious Diamond Dollars Case Competition project and in Resnick Player Profiles. A lifelong New York Islanders fan, Aidan always approaches his work with Drive4Five with an analytical mindset, focusing on the newest advancements in hockey analytics to maximize the precision of his content. Aside from sports analytics, Aidan is a dedicated violinist and chess player.