Alexander Romanov will have to wait another day to take part in competitive action after Friday’s Islanders-Rangers preseason game was postponed because of flooding.
But the good news — for him and for the Islanders — is that following offseason shoulder surgery that led the team to take some caution in the early part of camp, Romanov was going to be on the game roster Friday and should be in on Saturday.
“He’s going to get himself back into action and things are going to be a little bit different than they are in practice,” Islanders coach Lane Lambert said. “He’s excited. And so if there’s anything about him, you just have to make sure that he contains himself because he’s gung-ho.”
That is an apt description of the 23-year-old Moscow native.
Romanov, who gritted through his injury in the postseason, has made it no secret how much he wants to start playing.
Each time this camp when asked about his health, Romanov has said without hesitation that he feels good, has no pain, has no lingering issues and does not intend to let his shoulder hamper him.
The team held Romanov out of the first day of intrasquad scrimmages, but he has since participated in full.
His focus is much more on improving his play than on any aftereffects from the surgery.
“I can’t play one game really good, next game worse, third game better, worse, better worse,” Romanov said earlier this week. “I should play every time, do my best every time, do my job.”
It took until late last season — just before he went down at the start of April — for Romanov to find that consistency, a product of gaining comfort in a new system after being traded from Montreal last summer.
“It took time to just play in a different structure, with a different group of guys,” Romanov said. “And that’s probably why.”
When that understanding came, though, so too did Romanov’s own self-confidence — and the clarity that the Islanders might have dealt for a building block of their future on the draft floor in Montreal.
He is an old-school defenseman, willing to lay the body at any time and has command of his own zone.
When general manager Lou Lamoriello said before camp opened that Romanov would play with two broken legs, it was meant as the highest of compliments.
Moreover, the late-season pairing of Romanov and Ryan Pulock proved effective, and could be an option to carry into the start of this year.
“Part way through the year, you really kind of saw him come into his own and be a really solid presence back there,” Pulock said. “We’ll try and build on that. For him and me, playing together tonight or throughout the year, try to build that confidence together and just kind of start where we left off last year.”
At 23, Romanov is far from a finished product, as his offensive impact makes clear.
Though he doubled his assist total from 2021-22 last season, that still left him with a meager 22 points in total.
The next step for Romanov is being as aggressive with the puck on his stick as he is when trying to take it off someone else’s.
“More shots to the net from the blue line,” he said, when asked about how to make himself heard on offense. “Maybe join the rush a little bit more. Find the space to take a shot.”
Right before the conversation, he had gotten on the board during a scrimmage, lifting a point shot into a net-front crowd that — he said — went in untouched.
Now he just needs to do that when it counts.