The Injury List Hasn't Moved. The Questions About Last Season Have.

Training camp is open and the six names are still the six names. Barzal, Engvall, Palmieri, Pulock, Romanov, Varlamov — same list I've been running since August, no meaningful updates on any of them. That part isn't new. What's worth sitting with, now that camp is actually here, is what their absence forces you to reckon with about the season that just ended.

The Islanders went 43–39, which looked like progress after two losing seasons. But they finished minus-8 in goal differential, and they won 27 of 43 one-goal games — a 63% clip that ran well ahead of their overall win rate. When that close-game execution stopped working in the final stretch, the record caved fast: three wins in the last ten games, with a goal differential of minus-1.1 per night. The depth that should have cushioned the fall wasn't there. It wasn't there last spring, and right now it's even thinner.

So camp opens with the healthy group carrying a real burden. Bo Horvat and Matthew Schaefer are the two players most capable of setting a tone — Horvat was efficient when healthy last year, Schaefer was quietly one of the better young defensemen in the league by season's end. Anders Lee, Simon Holmstrom, Emil Heineman — they'll get more looks than they'd normally expect this early. That's fine for evaluation purposes. It doesn't answer the larger question, which is whether this roster, fully healthy, is actually a 43-win team or something that got there on execution and fortune and then ran out of both.

The answer won't come from camp. It'll come when the injured players return — if they return — and the team has to prove it can score without leaning on one-goal margins. That's the story of this season before it's started.