Mathew Barzal fires back at report kinking Patrick Roy to Islanders tension
Photo credit: Brad Penner-Imagn Images
Mathew Barzal and Pete DeBoer are trying to save the Islanders' season, but Barzal just slammed the door on one ugly Patrick Roy rumor.
That was the angle Wednesday. After Roy was fired and replaced by DeBoer, one report suggested players were tired of hearing Roy talk about his Stanley Cups.
Barzal did not hedge. He called that idea “completely ridiculous,” and that is what makes his response matter.
He went even further than that. Barzal said the room actually loved hearing Roy's stories about the teams he played on, especially those Montreal Cup teams.
That detail matters because it flips the whole rumor on its head. Barzal was not saying players tolerated it. He was saying it fueled them.
He explained why, too. Roy would remind the group that those Montreal teams were underdogs all year, and Barzal said that kind of message fed the Islanders. That is not annoyance. That is buy-in.
So when Barzal says the report is nonsense, it lands as more than a routine defense of a former coach. It sounds like a captain-level player protecting the truth about what the room really felt.
Mathew Barzal:
“That couldn’t be more untrue. If anything, we love hearing stories about the teams that he was on that won the cups, especially his team in Montreal. He’d always bring up just how they were underdogs all year, and that kind of stuff fueled us. So that report is just, it’s completely ridiculous.”
“That couldn’t be more untrue. If anything, we love hearing stories about the teams that he was on that won the cups, especially his team in Montreal. He’d always bring up just how they were underdogs all year, and that kind of stuff fueled us. So that report is just, it’s completely ridiculous.”
Barzal fires back at report about Patrick Roy and Islanders tension
That is the bigger story here. Mathieu Darche already said Roy's firing was not about one game or one moment, and that it was not all on the coach. He said the team had started to slide and needed a different voice.
Pete DeBoer backed that tone too. He said he has great respect for Roy, called the Islanders a good team with good people, and made it clear he was not interested in publicly listing what went wrong under the previous staff.
Barzal's quote fits right into that. He is not saying Roy should still be behind the bench. He is saying the Cup-story rumor was false, and there is a big difference between those two things.
Same thing for his captain, Anders Lee :
“We’re definitely not frustrated with Patty talking about that kind of thing. When he did, it was very relevant to the situation, and only him trying to help and tell a story. No one was walking away with those feelings.”
That difference matters for Islanders fans trying to sort through the noise. Roy was fired after New York dropped 4 straight and 7 of 10, slipping 1 point behind Ottawa for the final wild-card spot.
Darche moved fast because he saw DeBoer as the top coach on the market and did not want to wait for summer competition.
But Barzal just made one thing clear. Whatever led to Roy's exit, it was not a room rolling its eyes at Cup stories. According to one of the Islanders' biggest voices, those stories actually mattered, and the rumor saying otherwise was way off base.
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| POLL | ||
AVRIL 9|50 ANSWERS Mathew Barzal fires back at report kinking Patrick Roy to Islanders tension Did Mathew Barzal do the right thing by publicly shutting down that Patrick Roy rumor ? | ||
| Yes | 44 | 88 % |
| No | 6 | 12 % |
| List of polls | ||