How He Performed During 2025-26 Season:<\/p>\n
Victor Eklund was loaned back to his SHL club, Djurgardens IF, by the New York Islanders for his D+1 year, and while it’s tempting to say his offense took a step back, we once again need to look at context. Last year, Djurgardens played in the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s second-tier professional league. This year, the team was part of the SHL, so they faced tougher competition. For Eklund, point totals to be not far off against tougher opponents (24 points in 43 games compared to 31 in 42 last year) is noteworthy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He got in one game with the Islanders at the end of the season\u2014and snagged his first career point along the way\u2014and played nine regular season games with their AHL affiliate, the Bridgeport Islanders (and a further two in the playoffs). He tallied 10 points in those games, really getting into a solid groove in the AHL in a way that bodes well for next season.<\/p>\n
The Islanders’ new AHL affiliate for next season, the Hamilton Hammers, is where Eklund is expected to start the year. This is the right call; the jump to North American hockey goes differently for every player. One of our biggest watch-and-see items for Eklund is how his offensive contribution will translate to the North American professional level, particularly the NHL, so not rushing him is definitely key. (The signs were good in his stint with Bridgeport, but it’s a small sample size.)<\/p>\n
That said, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him get in some stints with the big club here and there next year. And we’re not ruling out his making the team out of camp; it just feels like pacing his development is the better course of action for his longevity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How He Performed During 2025-26 Season: Victor Eklund was loaned back to his SHL club, Djurgardens IF, by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-774963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}