Eklund, a first-round pick (No. 16) by New York in the 2025 NHL Draft, had a goal and an assist on his 20th birthday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, it felt amazing,\u201d the forward, who played his third career game, said of scoring. \u201cI couldn\u2019t do it on a better day. So, yeah, amazing feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brayden Schenn<\/a>, Casey Cizikas<\/a> and Simon Holmstrom<\/a> also each had a goal and an assist, and Matthew Schaefer<\/a> and Logan Stanley<\/a> each had two assists for the Islanders (1-1-0), who were 5-for-5 on the penalty kill in their home opener.<\/p>\n Asked what was the most rewarding part of the win, coach Pete DeBoer said, \u201cThe guys getting rewarded. We went to work in training camp. It\u2019s going on close to three weeks ago, and there was a lot of stuff, a lot of work in the video room, on the ice, off the ice, trying to establish some things. Guys were really dialed in, and you want them to be rewarded for that commitment early because it promotes a belief in what you’re doing, and if you don’t win games, then it’s hard to build that. So I think it was an important win.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eklund, a first-round pick (No. 16) by New York in the 2025 NHL Draft, had a goal and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":920134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-920133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=920133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/920134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=920133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=920133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=920133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}