Before this draft — set to be the fourth in a row in which the Islanders will not pick in the first round — takes center stage, let’s take a look back to the last.
A year ago in Montreal, the Islanders traded their first-round pick for Alexander Romanov on the draft floor in a deal that also netted a fourth-rounder, used to draft defenseman Isaiah George.
The early returns from the five players picked the next day suggest that the one closest to joining the big club is not defenseman Calle Odelius, the first selection the Islanders made at 65th overall, but rather fifth-rounder Matt Maggio.
“He’s got all the tools,” Marc Savard, Maggio’s coach at the OHL’s Windsor Spitfires, told The Post. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a great training camp and has the opportunity to make the Islanders.”
That optimism aside, the roster math will not work in Maggio’s favor if general manager Lou Lamoriello’s plan to run things back is realized.
After winning the Ontario League’s Most Outstanding Player Award with 111 points, Maggio is also likely to start training camp behind the likes of Arnaud Durandeau and William Dufour, who have spent more time with AHL Bridgeport and got NHL stints last year.
Even so, that represents a ringing endorsement for a player who seems to be following Dufour’s path from a late-round overage pick to a legit prospect.
Savard, who took an assistant coaching job on Ryan Huska’s staff with the Flames soon after speaking with The Post, compared Maggio to Wyatt Johnston, who made an instant impact as a 19-year-old rookie in Dallas last season.
“We changed [him] from being kind of an outside player to taking pucks to the net more, creating more from those opportunities and then his statistics took off,” Savard said. “Always been a great skater. Powerful.
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“He skates a lot like [Mathew] Barzal in that sense, they’ve got a lot of similarities in their skating and the puck control. But again, he just started taking pucks to the net, putting pucks at the net, which equaled a lot better results. That was the big thing. Getting him to go to the net more.”
Maggio played three games with Bridgeport last season after Windsor was eliminated from the postseason, recording two assists with the Baby Isles.
Training camp and the preseason will give more of a blueprint as to where he truly stands in the organizational pecking order, but it is without question that the Islanders need as much scoring help as possible.
As for Odelius, who at 19 is a year younger than Maggio, the Swedish defenseman told The Post that 2024 is the target year for him to move to North America.
After finishing his first year at the senior level in the Swedish Allsvenskan, Odelius has been working with development coach and former Isles defenseman Eric Cairns.
“They’re much stronger, much bigger [than juniors],” Odelius, who is listed at 6-foot-1, 185 pounds, said of the competition. “You had to work and be smart in the D-zone, boxing out guys. Be [in between] the net and the guy all the time to have the right side on him. Just small things like that, that comes with time.”
Odelius has also worked on shooting from the blue line more freely and, during the offseason, is focused on adding some weight.
Regarding the possibility of jumping to the country’s first division, the SHL, he sounded nonplussed about staying with his current club, Djugardens, in the second division, if it is where he can play.
“If I get to play on the power play and play 20 minutes in the Allsvenskan instead of playing 10 minutes and no power play in the SHL, I would choose power play and play 20 minutes in Allsvenskan 10 out of 10 times,” he said. “I’ve talked with Lou [Lamoriello] and the development coaches, too. They’re saying the exact same things.”
