For Veteran NY Islanders, Stadium Series Symbolizes What They’ve Built

More than 10 years after they played in the Islanders’ first Stadium Series game, the quartet of Casey Cizikas, Cal Clutterbuck, Matt Martin and Brock Nelson are preparing to take the ice for the franchise’s second Stadium Series game on Sunday afternoon.

And there’s roughly 2,823 ways — one way per each game the four players have combined to play in the (mostly) blue and orange — to put the scope of their longevity into context.

The Islanders dressed in the home locker room at Yankee Stadium when they fell to the Rangers 2-1 on Jan. 29, 2014 — two weeks before Derek Jeter announced he’d retire following the upcoming season.

None of the current members of the Giants or Jets — the NFL occupants of MetLife Stadium, where Sunday’s Islanders-Rangers game will be held — were with a New Jersey-based football team in 2014. In fact, among the four major sports, the only other metropolitan New York athlete whose tenure with his team matches that of Cizikas, Clutterbuck and Nelson is Rangers left winger Chris Kreider. (Martin spent two seasons with the Maple Leafs from 2016-18)

Counting Anders Lee, who joined the team for good later in the 2013-14 season, this is the longest-tenured group of Islanders since the dynastic sextet of Bob Bourne, Clark Gillies, Denis Potvin, Bobby Nystrom, Billy Smith and Bryan Trottier.

There is only one other team in the four major sports with five players still remaining from their ’13-14 roster — the Washington Capitals.

There’s also the simple and sobering method of looking at the calendar.

“You say 11 years,” Cizikas said with a laugh. “That makes us sound old.”

But the best barometer of what they’ve done, what they’ve built and why they’ve been selected as the architects might have been provided by the newest member of the Islanders.

“I think this is what this organization is all about — they believe in their players, they stick with their players,” said head coach Patrick Roy, who will be coaching his ninth game with the team Sunday afternoon. “You look at Boston, what (Zdeno) Chara did in Boston. What (Patrice) Bergeron did in Boston with Brad Marchand.

“And it was the same thing for me in Montreal. I mean, having the chance to play with leaders like (Bob) Gainey and (Larry) Robinson helped me a lot to become not the perfect leader, but a better leader. And it helps me, in tough situations, to not panic but stay calm and try and find a solution instead of being (ticked) off. You’re just ‘OK, what can we do to be better?’”

For the Islanders prior to the arrivals of Cizikas, Clutterbuck, Lee, Martin and Nelson, the answer was just about everything.

The Islanders had the third-fewest points in the NHL in the 12 seasons from 1999-2000 through 2011-12 — ahead of only the Atlanta Thrashers/Winnipeg Jets franchise, which began play in 1999-2000, and the Columbus Blue Jackets, a 2000-01 expansion franchise, but behind the Minnesota Wild, who debuted alongside the Thrashers.

The Islanders had one more playoff win in that span (six) than uniform combinations. Charles Wang saved the franchise and kept it on Long Island by purchasing the team from Steven Gluckstern and Howard Milstein, who basically cut and ran once they realized they couldn’t get a new building to replace Nassau Coliseum.

But between the chaotic moves made by carnival barker general manager Mike Milbury, the well-intentioned if ill-fated splashes Wang made by signing Alexei Yashin and Rick DiPietro to 10- and 15-year deals and the seemingly Quixotic pursuit of a new arena, the Islanders remained an afterthought until the drafts of Garth Snow — who, in another uniquely quirky Islanders move, went straight from the ice to the general manager’s office following the 2005-06 season — began bearing fruit.

Martin, Cizikas, Lee, Nelson and Josh Bailey — the latter of whom played all 1,057 of his NHL games for the Islanders — were all drafted between 2008 and 2010 along with John Tavares, the top overall pick in 2009, and Nino Niederreiter, the no. 5 pick in 2009 who was traded for Clutterbuck prior to the 2013-14 season.

“When you lose in the NHL for long enough, it gets very frustrating, very irritating,” Clutterbuck said. “I think we had a group of guys — starting with Kyle Okposo (Snow’s first pick in 2006) and (2002 draftee) Franz (Nielsen) — (who) kind of said ‘Enough’s enough.’

“As a young group of guys, we just decided that we weren’t going to allow that anymore and we sort of kind of just rallied around each other and became very close.”

Current core players Scott Mayfield, Adam Pelech, Ryan Pulock, Ilya Sorokin and Mathew Barzal were all drafted between 2011 and 2015. They have absorbed part or all of the experience of playing under two ownership groups, two general managers and five head coaches while calling four buildings home — from Nassau Coliseum to Barclays Center back to Nassau Coliseum before heading to UBS Arena.

“A fair amount of these guys have seen a lot of different changes, a lot of different arenas,” Martin said, “We’ve seen the good and the bad and the ugly and kind of gone through it all.”

But the path from there to here is most vivid for Cizikas, Clutterbuck, Martin and Nelson, who are as much core Islanders as they are core islanders.

Cizikas, Clutterbuck and Martin have manned the fourth line — dubbed the identity line, in no small reason because its grinding, pesky nature is particularly appreciated by Long Islanders — for the last six seasons. Nelson, in the midst of his age-32 season, is on pace for a third straight 30-goal campaign after never reaching the milestone in his first eight seasons and increasingly looks like he’ll be the last player in franchise history to wear no. 29.

All four have relocated from Canada and Minnesota, respectively, and are raising their families on the Island — a symbolically key move for a franchise that had to suspend Kirk Muller, Evgeni Nabokov and Lubomir Visnovsky when they declined to report after being acquired.

“The way that not only us but our families have grown up together, it’s been a lot of fun and something that we’re going to cherish for a long time,” Cizikas said. “It’s just a testament to how much we love this organization, how much we love Long Island and what this place means to us.”

Cizikas, Clutterbuck and Nelson endured the disappointment of the Islanders finishing last in 2013-14 following a playoff berth in 2013 as well as the uncertainty presented by not only the Barclays experiment but Tavares’ departure after the Islanders missed the playoffs for the second straight season in 2017-18.

Since then, the Islanders have made the postseason four times in five years and reached the NHL semifinals in 2020 and 2021, when they fell to the eventual champion Tampa Bay Lightning. After the Game 7 loss to the Lightning in 2021, a teary-eyed Barzal sat next to a stoic Nelson on a podium and talked about how much it hurt him to fall short of the Stanley Cup for the team’s veterans — a reaction to a near-miss that was impossible to imagine a generation earlier.

“You think of the hard times and sometimes we laugh at how things were,” Nelson said. “You made it through it and you enjoy the good times and just try to get back to that.”

Or, as the ever-blunt Clutterbuck put it: “When you have results, when you’ve really done it with your teammates and your buds, it means more to you than when you didn’t go through the (stuff). Going through the (stuff) is what makes the winning taste better.”

The reaction to the Game 7 loss in 2021 underlined the bottom-line, euphoria-or-misery nature of the NHL, where ranking 15th in the league in points over a 12-season span isn’t normally a laudable achievement.

But such a placement for the Islanders since 2012-13 is a noteworthy benchmark — especially as the end of this era, at least for its core members, inevitably nears.

Bailey’s career likely ended in unceremonious fashion last spring, when he was a healthy scratch for all six playoff games — the first playoff games for the Islanders since the 2021 run to the edge of the Cup. Clutterbuck and Martin are 36 and 34 and in the last year of their contracts. Lou Lamoriello will never rebuild, but the Islanders are five points out of a wild card spot entering Sunday.

“My hope is that the cherry on top will be winning the ultimate prize with this team,” Clutterbuck said.

But if not, Clutterbuck and his fellow core members will take pride in knowing what they built, how they built it and how the Islanders that played in the franchise’s second Stadium Series game is in far sturdier shape than the one that participated in a Stadium Series game 10 years earlier.

“I think there’s so many things that have happened the last 10 years, but I think what we’ll probably, years down the line, look back on, going to look back on and be proud of is the fact that when we do leave this place, I think we’ll have left it in a better place than when we first got here,” Clutterbuck said.

“And there’s a lot to be said for that.”