Pluses, perils of leaning into Matthew Schaefer’s Islanders stardom

For the past seven seasons, if there were such a thing as the face of the New York Islanders, it was entirely an accident on the part of the franchise itself.

This was Lou Lamoriello’s philosophy: Nobody is bigger than the team. That extended, in explicit terms, to the marketing department, to social media, to any kind of public relations.

The Islanders did not gear promotions around current players, they did not do the sort of block-and-tackle social media or marketing that nearly every other sports franchise does, they did not even promote charities and foundations of individual players out of a fear that it would elevate one over the rest.

Those restrictions are all gone now, and one of the more compelling pieces of the summer has been watching the organization learn to live in its new reality, where on Monday night into Tuesday, it could post 16 different times on X about No. 1 overall pick Matthew Schaefer.