NY Islanders: It's four weeks and counting of the silent treatment

No National Hockey League team wants to have a silent May. It means your season didn't go nearly as far as you hoped it would.

The New York Islanders have had a quiet this month, and it's not only because their 2022-23 season ended on April 28th in Game 6 of the first-round series against the Carolina Hurricanes.

The team's 'clean out' day was on May 1st. Every player met with the media that afternoon, reflected on the season, and shared thoughts on where they thought the team or themselves will go from here. We were told that day that GM Lou Lamoriello and head coach Lane Lambert would not be speaking that afternoon, but they would be at some point in the future.

Four weeks later and that statement can still technically be true, but no one imagined that Memorial Day weekend would come and go with the media and fanbase still waiting to hear from their GM and head coach - something that has happened for every other team following the end of their regular season or after they were eliminated from the playoffs.

In the weeks that followed, silence could've meant any number of things that would've made the lack of communication understandable. Lamoriello had been reportedly in the final year of his contract and his status needed to be sorted out with ownership. Lambert, while making the playoffs in his first season, had an up and down year and is still learning on the job to an extent. Perhaps ownership was evaluating their front office and what was happening around the league before making a decision.

But now, nearly a month later, with an undercurrent of news stating that both Lamoriello and Lambert will be back, why still the silence? Lamoriello may feel that no good can come from him and Lambert answering questions from the media for 10-20 minutes. He may be right, but there is still a certain obligation to the fanbase to hear from the leaders of their organization after a second straight season that fell short of aspirations.

We may not hear from Lamoriello or Lambert until the draft - and even if we will do, what will they tell us? It's plausible that the status quo remains in place and even if Lamoriello did get a new three year contract as speculated, he never talks about his status publicly.

I expect the first question to be why so much time went by before addressing the media. I expect the second to be about Lamoriello's contract status. They've certainly had long enough to come up with an answer, although that won't guarantee a fulfilling response.