Oliver Wahlstrom, breathing harder than normal Friday night, tried to keep perspective amid frustration.
For all Wahlstrom’s positive talk a few weeks ago about how knee surgery that ended his season early and kept him off the ice for months had helped his mentality and allowed him a reset, what came next proved this won’t be so easy.
In a battle for playing time among himself, Julien Gauthier, Hudson Fasching and Simon Holmstrom, Wahlstrom has come out of camp behind.
He’s been heavy on his skates, a little behind the pace and still clearly getting his timing, confidence and endurance back.
“Obviously it’s different,” Wahlstrom told The Post following the Islanders’ preseason finale, a 3-0 loss to the Devils. “But slowly getting back into it. Just take it one day at a time.”
After an injury like Wahlstrom’s, merely getting on ice and playing games is not the end of the recovery process.
When Anders Lee tore his ACL in March 2021, it took until about a year later before he started to look wholly like himself again.
Some patience is warranted. Wahlstrom, after all, did not get back on the ice until the summer, and is still skating with a brace on his left knee.
Still, this is a meritocracy. And it is hard to argue based on the last few weeks that Wahlstrom should be in the lineup against Buffalo on Saturday.
“We’ve talked about it all training camp, he’s coming off a long layoff,” coach Lane Lambert said. “He’s getting up to game speed, he’s getting in situations that he can play in. To me, it looks like he’s still trying to find his way a little from a speed standpoint.”
There is no such thing as a good time for such a situation to occur, but this feels like a particularly tough one. Wahlstrom is on a one-year deal, which amounts to a referendum on whether he will stay with the Islanders beyond this season.
The idealized version of his game — a physical power forward with a big shot — would fit perfectly into the Islanders’ lineup, perhaps even on the first line.
But for the time being, everyone involved has to grin, bear it and be happy with small steps as the 23-year-old tries to return to being himself.
And that might mean Wahlstrom spending more time as a healthy scratch than he’d like at the start of the season.
“Obviously you can’t really get too frustrated, but at the same time, it is tough sometimes,” Wahlstrom said. “It takes a little bit to get the lungs back, timing back, things like that. Just gotta be patient.”
The silver lining here is that, at least publicly, Wahlstrom is taking the right attitude, not being too frustrated without giving an unrealistic account of the situation.
Ditto for Lambert, who answered the question of whether Wahlstrom’s getting back to game speed needs to involve playing in regular-season games without committing to, “Yes.”
“It’s solved in a couple different ways,” Lambert said. “When we have a good practice, he has to continue to solve that. When he gets his opportunity, we have to see him at game speed.”
In other words, don’t pull the fire alarm if Wahlstrom’s playing time is sparing for the first couple of weeks of the season. It helps no one, least of all him, to ask more than he can give. Especially when Fasching and Gauthier have turned in good training camps of their own, there is no need to rush.
“I kinda understood what I was getting myself into come game time,” Wahlstrom said. “I’ve been off the ice for a while. For me, it’s about being patient and just going from there.”
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