For most of the past several months, the regular-season finale between the Carolina Hurricanes and New York Islanders looked as if it would be a potential playoff preview.
However, while the Hurricanes will be in tune-up mode on Tuesday, the Islanders will be wondering where a previously successful season went wrong as they prepare for an uncertain spring and summer.
The Hurricanes and Islanders will close out their regular-season schedules on Tuesday when Carolina faces New York in a battle of Metropolitan Division rivals in Elmont, N.Y.
The Hurricanes will be completing a back-to-back road set after falling to the Philadelphia Flyers 3-2 in the shootout Monday night. The Islanders were off Monday after their costly late-season skid continued Sunday, when they were eliminated from playoff contention with a 4-1 loss to the visiting Montreal Canadiens.
The Islanders (43-33-5, 91 points) needed to win their final two games and have the Flyers lose their final two to have any chance of getting the third and final playoff berth from the division.
However, getting eliminated on the ice served as a stark reminder of the scope of the collapse for the Islanders, who were in third place in the Metropolitan for most of the previous four months before going 4-9-0 since March 19.
First-year general manager Mathieu Darche fired head coach Patrick Roy on April 5. The Islanders beat the Toronto Maple Leafs 5-3 in Peter DeBoer’s debut on Thursday, but New York then fell 3-0 to the Ottawa Senators on Saturday before being blanked into the third period on Sunday.
“I feel for them,” DeBoer said Sunday night. “They put in 81 games here and seven months. So that’s a lot of blood, sweat and work that went into that. And when the lights go out on a season, it’s never easy after you put in that kind of time.”
The hard part may be coming for Darche and the Islanders, who found a franchise cornerstone in rookie defenseman Matthew Schaefer (23 goals and 59 points). But New York has four defenseman 30 or older, and Darche needs to decide the fate of captain Anders Lee, who is 35 and headed for free agency.
The short-term focus is much different for the Hurricanes (52-22-7, 111 points), who won the Metropolitan Division and clinched the top seed in the Eastern Conference by collecting a point for the shootout loss on Monday.
Carolina will oppose the second wild card — either the Boston Bruins or the Senators — in the first round of the postseason this weekend.
“That’s a huge accomplishment,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “It says you had a real good year and you came to play every night. You can’t luck into that.”
Carolina is in the playoffs for the eighth straight season, breaking the franchise record set by the then-Hartford Whalers from 1986 through 1992. But the Hurricanes have yet to appear in the Stanley Cup Final during their current run, They reached the Eastern Conference finals in 2019, losing to the Bruins, and fell in the East to the Florida Panthers in both 2023 and 2025.
With the playoffs on the horizon, the Hurricanes scratched Sebastian Aho, Andrei Svechnikov and Seth Jarvis — their first-, second- and fourth-leading scorers — on Monday along with captain Jordan Staal and top defensemen Shayne Gostisbehere and Jaccob Slavin.
