The New York Islanders are off to a solid start to the season, and a major reason why has been the performance of one of their star players.
Despite a fair amount of injuries early in the season and one of their best offensive players, Mathew Barzal, not playing yet this year, the Islanders have a 5-3-1 record and have been really good at home so far.
Expectations for the Islanders were a bit mixed coming into the year, but so far they have performed well. There is still a long season to go, but New York doing as well as they have is encouraging.
As expected with the team doing well, their goalie Ilya Sorokin has been performing at a very high level once again. The Islanders rely on him to be one of the best in the league, and he has delivered.
However, while Sorokin has performed well, so too has their emerging young star, Matthew Schaefer. Expectations for the reigning Calder Trophy winner were through the roof coming into the year, and it has been so far so good.
Schaefer is Living Up to the Hype
After taking the league by storm in his rookie season and being one of the best 18-year-olds to play in the NHL in a long time, the sky is clearly the limit for Schaefer and what he is going to be able to accomplish in the league.
For New York, he has already become the face of the franchise, and so far this season he is picking up right where he left off in terms of production. As a rookie, Schaefer totaled 59 points with 23 goals and 36 assists. With eight power play goals and 10 power play assists, he was a major factor on the man-advantage.
Furthermore, with a +/- of 13, the Islanders were a strong team when he was on the ice.
This season, while he has yet to score a goal in nine games, he has totaled eight assists, three of which are on the power play. Even though the production might be a bit different in terms of him getting more assists compared to goals right now, he has been close to a point-per-game player early on.
Schaefer has been carrying a heavy workload right now at almost 26 minutes per game. At 19 years old, he is certainly fresh, but that will be something for Peter DeBoer to monitor over the course of a long season.
However, even though he has yet to find the back of the net, it has been an excellent sophomore campaign so far for Schaefer.
Add us as a preferred source on Google