There has been nothing resembling a learning curve for Isaiah George through two games in the NHL.
The 20-year-old has instead walked in and looked like a veteran, playing with poise and stabilizing a back end that is missing all three players who made up its left side on opening night.
When Patrick Roy put George on the nominal top pair with Noah Dobson ahead of Thursday’s 4-2 win over the Senators in Ottawa, the belief was that “nominal” would be the operative word and Roy would likely spend the game rotating his defense pairs and leaning heavily on Dobson, Scott Mayfield and Ryan Pulock.
Instead, George rarely missed a shift, finished with 23:49 of ice time — slightly more playing time than Mayfield — and did not put a foot wrong in the win with his family watching from the Canadian Tire Center stands.
“Just fantastic, honestly,” Pulock said. “As a young kid coming in, he’s done a great job of keeping his feet moving. He’s moving with the puck. He’s poised with the puck. You can see his confidence growing shift by shift.”
It is hard to overstate just how big a risk it was to call up George, who had played just four games with AHL Bridgeport.
However good he looked in training camp, the Islanders were tossing him right into the deep end and could not really afford for him to fail given the current state of the blue line.
For George to not just come in and hold his own but to earn that sort of ice time and excel is a mammoth feat.
“He skates well and moves really well on the ice,” Roy told reporters in Ottawa. “I thought for a guy that it’s only his second game, he was getting more and more confident out there. I was very pleased with the way he played.”
George does not yet have a point, but offense is not his modus operandi.
Rather, he is billed as a stabilizer and an eraser on the back end, and that is just what he has been so far, repeatedly putting himself in the right place and making the right decisions with the puck.
He might just be creating some tough decisions for Roy and Lou Lamoriello in the process.
Jean-Gabriel Pageau, an Ottawa native, was honored by his minor league hockey team Wednesday night with his family making the trip to attend.
“It was great,” Pageau told reporters. “There were a lot of memories, lot of sacrifice from me, from my friends, from everyone around me. I think it was an honor for all of us, not only me, but it was a great moment to lift that [banner] with everyone.” … Ryan Pulock played his 500th NHL game.
