When Noah Dobson first came up to the NHL back in the 2019-20 season, he was usually a healthy scratch. That gave him a lot of time.
It’s standard practice in the NHL that healthy scratches stay on the ice for a longer practice after a morning skate, and even get worked harder on normal practice days. For Dobson, that meant working on his shot.
As a prospect, Dobson had flashed offensive potential, especially with his passing and special-teams play, but never scored more than 17 goals in a season while playing in the Quebec Major Junior League.
“My shot was just OK,” Dobson told The Post. “At this level, you gotta be able to get pucks to the net. Guys are good at blocking shots, so you gotta have some velocity on it.”
No one could accuse Dobson of lacking those qualities on his shot now. Just 33 games into the Islanders’ season, he’s three goals off his career high, having scored 10 times. A shot that was “just OK” has become a weapon, effective from anywhere on the ice and with the velocity to beat goaltenders without the help of tips and deflections.
The reason behind the improvement, according to Dobson, is simple.
“Just shooting a lot of pucks,” the soon-to-be 23-year-old defenseman said. “I think it’s always something I’ve taken pride in over the summer. Make sure I’m shooting a lot of pucks on the ice, off the ice. It’s always something I’ve liked to do, and I think it’s important.”
Dobson is a hockey fan first and foremost, and spends a lot of his off nights during the season flipping through the out-of-town games. It’s not what you would call a film session in the traditional sense, but it lets Dobson pick up what players such as Cale Makar and Roman Josi are doing on a nightly basis and try to incorporate it into his game.
He’s worked with skills coaches over the summers in Prince Edward Island, too, but most of the development of his shot has come on his own, via repetition.
“There’s different shots you work on,” Dobson said. “I’ve worked a lot on my one-timer, just on the power play. Those are usually the shots I’m getting. But just putting yourself in different positions to get pucks off quickly or stuff like that. Just trying to not just have a good slap shot and OK wrist shots. Kinda have a full package of shots.”
The slap shot, once a weapon used by players across the league, has largely fallen out of favor as the game has gotten faster and defenders have begun to close down space quicker. Especially for defensemen, who are usually handling the puck at the top of the offensive zone, a dangerous one-timer is the best weapon you can have.
Dobson’s is just that — last week against the Bruins, for example, he unleashed a rocket from the right point to tie the game at two.
It doesn’t hurt either that under coach Lane Lambert, Islanders defensemen are more empowered to be involved offensively.
“The way they create offense now is a little more beneficial for him,” former Isles D-man Devon Toews said. “It allows him to get up in the play and join a little bit more than he used to be able to. By just being trustworthy, a trustworthy player, he’s really gained that loyalty, being able to jump up and make reads and take some risks that some other guys wouldn’t do.”
Added Lambert: “We have more of a shot mentality from the defense. There’s a little bit less of D-to-D [passing], a lot more shots. Especially from low to high… as long as we have traffic [around the net]he’s having some success.”
That low-to-high puck movement has benefited nearly all of the Islanders’ defensemen — not just Dobson. Scott Mayfield is only one goal off his career high, and Adam Pelech, despite being injured, is just two goals away from setting a career-best mark. Dobson, though, has more than doubled the output of any of the Islanders’ other defensemen.
In part, that’s a result of power-play minutes, but he has more even-strength goals (seven) as well. That traces all the way back to three years ago, when Dobson was on the ice with the other healthy scratches after morning skates.
“I found that first year was a big step for my shot to get better,” he said. “Then I came back the second year and just continued to get those extra reps, get those extra shots.”
On Wednesday, as the Islanders came off the ice for practice, Dobson was slow to leave. He stayed on an extra few minutes, practicing one-timers.
Checking in with Toews
Before the Islanders played the Avalanche on Monday, Toews was asked about facing the Lightning in the 2022 Stanley Cup Final after having played Tampa Bay with the Isles in the 2020 NHL semifinals.
“Similar team, played a similar way,” he said. “Just different on this side.”
And different in the result. Toews is a Stanley Cup champion now, Makar’s partner on what might be the best defensive pairing in the league. Even when the Islanders traded him for just a pair of second-round picks seemed like pennies on the dollar with a cap crunch looming, no one quite saw this coming.
Toews has been in Colorado now for longer than he was on Long Island, and he now carries with him the experience of having won a championship.
“I think it was one or two days later [winning], I don’t know where we were, we were somewhere enjoying ourselves. There’s three or four of us sitting on a couch, and [we] just started talking about how much we wanted to do it again,” Toews said. “And how much we wanted to enjoy it for the week or whatever that you have of going a little bit crazy, but then after that… I’d love to do it again.”
Cory Schneider knows his role
It’s refreshing to speak with Cory Schneider because few others with his kind of experience have his kind of perspective.
Schneider, 36, is a former All-Star with the Canucks and Devils who has played in a Stanley Cup Final (2011), but he does not carry himself with an air above his station. Now the emergency goaltender for the Islanders, he spends most of the season at AHL Bridgeport. He is not even sure if, given the opportunity, he would be able to play regularly in the NHL.
“I don’t know,” he said when that question was put to him in Denver on Monday. “Maybe if I was 10 years younger, it’d be different with the way that I’m playing down there. [in the AHL]. I understand the situation and what my role is. If other teams or people think that I can still play, that’s up to them, but for me it’s more of how I’m feeling.”
With the Islanders facing a back-to-back against the Rangers and Panthers before the holidays and Semyon Varlamov still out due to a lower-body injury, it’s at least possible Schneider would be in consideration to play. He acquitted himself well in a game against New Jersey last April in similar circumstances, although the Isles were out of the playoff race by then.
It seems more probable Lambert would run with Ilya Sorokin in a back-to-back, a situation Sorokin has handled before. But Schneider has a .921 save percentage in Bridgeport. It can’t be ruled out that he plays for the Isles.
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