Where do the New York Islanders go from here?

The reputation the New York Islanders forged over the course of two runs to the Eastern Conference Finals — both in fake seasons, mind you — continues to loom large.

The way this club is talked about, there is always an air of "This team just needs one or two tweaks, and then they'll be right back to it." But they only won two games out of six against a very banged-up Carolina Hurricanes team, and sure, four of them were one-goal games and it usually felt close. In fact, goals in the series ended up being 16-15 for the Hurricanes. But in the end, the gap in quality between these two teams was too much to overcome.

The reason that it continually feels as though this team is really close to cracking something is that they have maybe the best goalie in the world today in Ilya Sorokin, a handful