The Islanders do not need a road map to find wher📖e the purse strings are, nor how to tighten them. Yet as that grip has eased with the transition to new ownership and the first year of their cash-laden deal with Barclays Center, prioritie🐈s have shifted back to fielding the best team they can, with money as a secondary issue.
So look to their most consistently good player on a nightly basis, and realize that it would be utterly foolish for general manager Garth Snow to low🍸ball pending unrestricted free agent Frans Nielsen this summer and try💫 to keep his integral center at any type of bargain cost.
Nielsen, 31, played his 600th career regular-season game in Tuesday night’s 2-1 shootout win over the Hurricanes at home, and every one of those games have been with the Islanders. His 19 goals and 47 points through 75 games this season hardly defines who he is as a player, and the Islanders know that.
Yet he has just 13 career games of postseason experie꧒nce, a sad fact for such a terrific two-way player.
“I just feel that I’ve been through this rebuild with all these guys and we finally have a team here,” Nielsen told The Post on Tuesday morning. “For me, my first choice is to stay here and to keep building this team toward a Stanley Cup. You don’t know what’s out there, you don’t know what teams have interest🍨. Do you want to go through another rebuild?
“So there is a lot of stuff like that. I feel like I’m in a good spot here, we have a good team and hopefully we can work it out here. That, for sure, wo𝓡uld be my first choice.”
Snow had every right to wait and see how Nielsen performed down the stretch, but it would have been a shock if the heady Dane had been anything but his consistent self. It was a stand-up move for Snow to tell Nielsen that he wasn’t going to be traded before the Feb. 29💝 deadline, but now, the future is nothing but uncertain.
“Garth said that he wanted to keep the guys a𒁏round and he believed in this team,” Nielsen said.
Since he took over this club in 2006, Snow has done a lot of work with his hands tied behind his back. Needing to clean up the mess left by Mike Milbury, Snow focused on the🌟 draft and shopped in the free-agent bargain bin.
But that’s no longer the case. In the past two seasons, he has doled out $159.75 million in combined in deals for Johnny Boychuk, Nick Leddy, Travis Hamonic, Nikolay Kulemin, Mikhail Grabovski and Anders Lee. Some deals are better than others, ♎but that’s the way it works when you sit at the adults’ table.
There are still huge question marks looming, the biggest of all being captain John Tavares having only two more seasons left on his deal before an offer of $10 million per will be needed as a starting point. Kyle Okposo is also a pending unrestricted free agent this summer, and his ability to stuff the score sheet when playing well is quite attractive — more so out in the open market, where maybe some of the nightly flaws and inconsistencies can be m🐟ore easily overlooked.
So if Okposo’s market value is greater than his value to the Islanders, then only the opposite can be true for Nielsen, whom coach Jack Capuano called both “under🉐rated a little bit ⛎around the league” as well as “an extension of the coaching staff.”
Nielsen ranks third among Islanders forwards in all three on-ice categories: power-play time (2:44 per game), penalty kill (2:00) and total time on ice (17.32). The only other forward in the league to get more power-play and penalty-kill time is the Bruins’ Patrice Bergeron.
Bergeron, 30, has averaged about 10-15ꦿ percent more offensive production than Nielsen over the past five years, and he is a perennial postseason producer with a Stanley Cup on his resume. He’s in the second year of an eight-year, $55 million deal, at $6.875 per.
Nielsen won’t garner that many 𓆉years, but something at four to five years, hovering around $6 million per, ܫis commensurate with his importance to this team.
If Snow is serious about being a contender for the next couple of seasons, he won’t try to squeeze one of his best players. If this isn’t the same old cheap Islanders, then the money will go where it needs to be — in Nielsen’s bank account.