One Goal Per Game. That's What Barzal Is Worth.
The Islanders are scoring 2.0 goals per game over their last ten contests. In the twenty games before that stretch, they were at 3.0. The difference between those two numbers is not a slump, not bad puck luck, not a goaltending variance problem. It is Mathew Barzal, sitting in street clothes with a left kneecap that has now betrayed him twice.
That one-goal-per-game gap is the most clarifying number of the young 2026–27 season, because it strips away every organizational talking point. The front office spent the offseason re-signing Tony DeAngelo, hiring new AHL management, and chasing veteran front-office talent. None of those moves put the puck in the net. Barzal did—42 points in 50 games last season, a pace that dwarfed everyone else on the roster—and now he doesn't. The box score is not subtle about what that means.
Bo Horvat is doing everything asked of him and then some. At 0.85 points per game last season, he was a legitimate second engine on a functional offense. The problem is that second engines are not designed to run the whole machine. When Barzal is out, Horvat is not elevated to first-line center—he is elevated to the entire offensive identity of a team that went 2–3 to open the season and just absorbed a 1–6 loss at home to the Rangers. The depth behind him—Emil Heineman, Simon Holmstrom, Anders Lee—are contributors in a balanced attack. They are not equipped to compensate for the absence of the team's primary playmaker, and the scoring numbers confirm they haven't.
What makes this particularly grim is that I flagged the structural fragility in my September 21 piece: the Islanders' one-goal-game winning percentage was always more likely to regress than to hold. The current collapse is not regression to the mean, though. It is something sharper—a roster that was built around a specific player's presence, now asked to function without him, revealing that the depth behind him was never as solid as the standings suggested. The drop from Barzal to the next tier of offensive production is not a step down. It is a cliff.
The deeper issue is that there is no quick fix available at the forward position. Kyle Palmieri is already out. Pierre Engvall is out. Matias Maccelli's two-goal preseason performance felt encouraging at the time, but one good night in an exhibition does not manufacture the kind of consistent secondary production this team needs right now. The Islanders' wing depth has real holes on both sides—the right wing position in particular is producing at a fraction of what a starting NHL winger should generate. Maccelli is the best realistic option on the left side, and even he is unproven in a primary role.
My read is this: the Islanders are not in a temporary dip. They are in a structural exposure. Barzal's timeline was already uncertain when the season started—a two-week absence from skating in mid-September does not resolve cleanly into an opening-night return, and the 2–3 start suggests it didn't. Every week he remains out, the early-season hole deepens. Last year's team went 2–8 in its final ten games; this year's team is already replicating that pattern in its first five. The calendar does not wait for kneecaps to heal, and 2.0 goals per game will not win enough hockey games to buy the Islanders the time they need.