If you were on social media at any point on Thursday, you would have noticed many NHL teams practicing ice skating.
If you had been around the Islanders last season, you would have noticed Lane Lambert doing the same thing.
So by that measure, Patrick Roy's first day of training camp was unremarkable.
But Mat Barzal never looked out of sorts looking exhausted after last year's training camp.
On Thursday, other islanders took solace in the fact that Barzal, who relishes these days of endless skating, was as exhausted as the rest of them.
“I loved it,” Roy said after the third 90-minute session of a grueling first day of camp ended. “They knew they were going to work and they did. And that’s exactly what I was looking for.”
When Roy was hired in January, there was a lot of talk about him setting a new tone.
The Islanders, due to a combination of inertia and Lambert simply not being the right candidate to be head coach, had become too passive in their play and too easy to pick on.
That changed enough to get them into the playoffs, but everyone involved acknowledges that a major midseason overhaul was not, in a perfect world, how things would have played out.
Roy's first training camp and first full season behind the bench is a better opportunity to see his full impact, though if last year was a half-measure, it was a pretty good one.
When camp opened Thursday, it looked like a practice focused not only on endurance but also on physicality.
Before going through the skating drills that left them down, the Islanders focused primarily on one-on-one battles and “second quick,” Roy’s term for defensive support.
“You can’t really be prepared for it, even in practice, if you skate like that all summer,” said Alexander Romanov. “Before (doing the suicides), we spent an hour doing one-on-one battles, so you can be prepared for anything.
“You should be tired. That’s the goal of this practice: to get you tired and get ready for the next game, which is this Sunday (against the Devils). It’s just a short break between practice and the game. We should get ready.”
Noah Dobson, after taking 30 seconds to catch his breath, agreed.
“It’s what you expect,” he said. “The first day is always tough. No matter how hard you train or what you do in the summer, you can’t match that intensity. That’s the biggest change.”
It's about defining the roster, but also about creating a new standard, not just reinforcing it.
The next few days, in that sense, are more important than the first.
If Roy feels the need to beat the team again in February, that's a sign that what they did in September didn't work.
One thing that hasn't changed since Barry Trotz arrived in 2018: The Islanders aren't going to win a Stanley Cup on sheer scoring power and skill.
That's not to disparage the roster — which has, in fact, grown in those areas over the past two seasons — but to say that the heart and soul of the team is still made of dirt and grime.
This must be a roster that embraces hard work and fundamentals over the course of 82 nights, or the Islanders are set up for a bad sequel.
That, as everyone in the dressing room will tell you, is exactly what they like. Roy will force them to prove it.
“We want to raise the bar, there’s no doubt about that,” Roy said. “There’s no better way to do that than from Day 1. Set the tone for training camp. We want to use this training camp to set the tone for the start of our season.”
