Martin should be on the bench Parise should be playing I’d do a 4th line of Parise- Cizikas- Clutterbuck/Martin leaving Bellows- Pageau- Bailey on the third. Salo over Aho (probably) and Sorking starting other than that perfect.

The isles are counting are a few things this year:

- Romanov and Salo being a significant upgrade over Chara and Greene in terms of puck moving and skating ability.
- Lee playing like he did in the 2nd half of last year, he was clearly struggling in the first have coming back from ACL surgery in about 9 months.
- no Covid issues, the Isles had to play a bunch of games with basically an AHL roster before the NHL started canceling games.
- Palmeri bouncing back like he did in the 2nd half for a whole year.
- a more balanced schedule, no 13 game road trip, and 16 games in one month where the isles looked real tired at the end of the season.
- Wahlstrom taking a massive leap forward, he needs to have at a minimum 25 goals this year.
- Lambert allowing more offensive play, while not sacrificing the defensive system that made the Isles effective the last few years.

Pretty much on point. I think (as shown with the first comment) most Islanders fans are just hoping to see signs that Lambert is his own dude and will let the team be a little more offensively creative. Not just running out the same 4th line every night, but cycling guys in and out to keep an older lineup (especially in the bottom-6) fresh.

But yeah, I think this team is better than last year's for a few reasons:

-Going from Zdeno Chara/Andy Greene as LD2/3 to Alex Romanov/Robin Salo is a major upgrade. Younger, quicker, and better with the puck. I think that having two soft spots on the D made it difficult for the Islanders to actually succeed at the type of counterattacking game they're built for.

-Normalcy and routines. Last year was just an odd year for the team, as has been discussed before - no home games til nearly Thanksgiving, a weirdly unbalanced schedule that had multiple stretches of 10 days with only 1 game in them early on, then being one of 2 teams(with the Senators) forced to play through a full-on COVID outbreak for multiple games with AHL-level squads, and then all that scheduling catching up in the back end of the year when they played their last 43 games over 79 days - the equivalent of 11 straight weeks of playoff-scheduled hockey. Just getting to a normal, balanced, 3-4ish games a week schedule with routine practice and rest will be great for this team.

There is probably enough there to reasonably assume that the team will be better, probably enough to earn a playoff spot at the expense of probably the Capitals and/or the Devils. Still not sure it's enough to put them back into actual contention though