Better luck next year: Will a flawed Islanders team get the Peter DeBoer boost?

Peter DeBoer gets a lot out of teams early, and then it all fizzles out. Usually spectacularly. What does that mean for the 2026-27 New York Islanders?

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the New York Islanders.

Lou Lamoriello hasn’t had a hand in running the New York Islanders in over a year, but they still made a very Lou-like move late in the 2025-26 NHL season when they fired head coach Patrick Roy with four games remaining and replaced him with Peter DeBoer.

It was a chaotic move, but it also made a lot of sense.

The Islanders were rapidly fading and letting a playoff spot was slip through their fingers. It also gave them an opportunity to get ahead of the game and secure what was probably going to be one of the top head-coaching candidates of the offseason before anybody else really had a chance at him.

DeBoer has always been a fascinating coach to me, and I can’t decide if he’s a good bad coach, a bad good coach, or something in between.

On one hand, he’s had a lot of success in a lot of different places.

He’s taken two different teams to the Stanley Cup Final (New Jersey and San Jose) and two other teams to the Conference Finals (Vegas Golden Knights and Dallas Stars). His 97 career playoff wins are the fifth-most among ALL NHL head coaches in the history of the sport, and the second-most among active coaches, trailing only Joel Quenneville.

He wins. A lot. And a lot of teams want him whenever he becomes available. Even more than your typical NHL head-coaching recycling bin exercise.

Those same teams also get pretty tired of him, pretty quickly, and for as often as he gets hired, he also gets fired. Even when he wins.

The Islanders are his sixth-different head-coaching stop since the start of the 2008-09 season.

The only one he’s lasted four full seasons with is San Jose.

He made it to year four with New Jersey before being fired in the middle of that season.

Florida, Vegas and Dallas moved on from him within three years. And it’s not like there was a lack of success in most of those places. The team’s were generally good, and generally really successful.

He’s had some rocky relationships with goalies.

His benching of Marc-Andre Fleury in Vegas produced one of the funniest hockey memes in recent memory when Fleury’s agent, Allan Walsh, posted a photoshopped picture of his client being stabbed in the back with a giant sword that had DeBoer’s name on the handle of it.

His throwing of Jake Oettinger under the bus in Dallas following a Western Conference Finals appearance was the tipping point for that change. It was also a change that came after he went three-for-three in reaching the Western Conference Finals during his tenure.

He can be a demanding and incredibly structured coach. And while that can produce good results, it also creates a shelf-life that reaches its expiration date pretty quickly.

The good news? The recipe usually taste pretty good before it spoils, and it’s usually an immediate success.

With the exception of his time in Florida (his first head-coaching job), every team that DeBoer has coached has reached at least the Conference Finals in his first year on the job, while also seeing a dramatic improvement in its on-ice process.

Just to give an idea of what that looks like, here is what each team did in his first full year behind its bench, compared to what it did in the full year before he took over.

Every team improved by at least four wins in the standings.

Each of the past three teams also saw a pretty significant increase in their expected goals share.

Vegas was a little unique because he initially took over late in the 2019-20 season (which was cut short due to the pandemic), while his first full season was the 2020-21 season which only lasted 56 games. All of the point numbers for those seasons are projected over a full 82-game season.

Either way, his team’s generally improve when he shows up.

That should be good news for the Islanders, because for as promising as their 2025-26 season turned out to be, they still need some improvement.

They finished the season with a respectable 91 points, but were positively terrible in most process-driven, underlying metrics.

They were 25th in 5-on-5 expected goal share.

They were 25th in scoring chances against per 60 minutes, 30th in high-danger scoring chances against pr 60 minutes and 30th in expected goals against per 60 minutes.

In other words, they were consistently getting caved in defensively and nothing about their 5-on-5 play was playoff worthy. The two biggest things that kept them in the race as long as possible was the rapid development of rookie defenseman Matthew Schaefer and another strong season from starting goalie Ilya Sorokin.

Given the process behind their results, DeBoer would seem to be the perfect coach to get the most out of them.

But he’s also going to have his work cut out for him given the flawed nature of the roster.

He has a great goalie. That helps. He has a young superstar entering year two of his career. That also helps.

But there is a serious lack of impact talent at forward, not a lot of depth to work with and an awful lot of players that are on the wrong side of 30.

He is going to need a lot of help from his front office, and that front office is going to have to find some ways to be creative to work through some of this mess.

Let’s take a little more of a look at where things went right and wrong for the Islanders in 2025-26, and the situation DeBoer is taking over.

What went right this season