The Islanders signed Ben Hutton to a one-year deal Thursday, days after signing the defenseman to a professional tryout contract and hours before facing the Hurricanes at UBS Arena.
The Islanders held an optional skate Thursday morning, making it unclear whether Hutton would be needed to step into the lineup. After Ryan Pulock’s injury, he would be an obvious candidate to play the left side of a third pair that featured two righties in Saturday’s 4-0 loss to the Oilers.
“You’re just trying to get him up to speed,” head coach Pete DeBoer said Thursday morning. “He hasn’t taken any real reps with NHL players since training camp. It’s a tough ask to come in midseason like that.
“He’s excited to be here. I think he’s excited to be around the group. You can tell he wants to play hockey. No one likes sitting at home. I can see his enthusiasm about being back in a team environment again. Every day, we’re just trying to get him back up to speed so that, when we do get a chance to look at him, we give him a fair chance.”
That chance may come awfully quickly.
For all the attention and anxiety over the Islanders’ remade power play, which has lately fallen back to earth, it’s their penalty kill that might deserve some plaudits.
Entering Thursday, the Islanders ranked top five in the league with a whopping 86 percent success rate on the penalty kill, even while taking Matthew Schaefer out of the PK rotation to conserve his minutes and even with injury hits to Pulock and Alexander Romanov, two defenders prominent in DeBoer’s PK plans.
“Not just the defensemen; I think our group of penalty killers is really good, and they have a history of being good here,” DeBoer said. “If you look back even last year and previous years, some teams are built to have really good power plays, some teams are built to have good penalty kills. And if you can get both, then you’re in a good spot.”
The Islanders debuted their Hometown Remix Fisherman jerseys Thursday. It’s the second time this decade they’ve brought back the infamous design, the first one during the 2022-23 season.
Semyon Varlamov started in net against Carolina, making it a 50-50 split between him and Ilya Sorokin over the last six games.
Sorokin has started 10 of the Islanders’ first 15, on pace for roughly 56 starts of 84 games should the current trend hold.
Mathew Barzal (left knee), Pulock (upper body) and Matias Maccelli (lower body) all took part in an optional Islanders morning skate while wearing red noncontact jerseys.
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