Behind Islanders rookie Isaiah George’s unexpected rise: Big OHL minutes and ‘lunch pail’ work ethic
Dylan Hunter remembers a game during Isaiah George 's first season with the OHL's London Knights.
George was a promising 17-year-old just starting to get his game together. The Knights, with Dale Hunter as head coach and son Dylan as the assistant coach running the defense, had a top-pair defenseman injured.
They needed George to step in and play big minutes against a deep opponent.
"He's playing against Kitchener's top line," Dylan Hunter says, "and we knew we had something. You don't want to put a young kid in that situation, but we had to. A high-pressure situation, and he took it in stride."
Three years later, a similar situation is playing itself out for George — this one as high-pressure as it gets. The Islanders are decimated by injuries to the left side of their defense, and George, despite still having played fewer than 10 professional games, has been called on to step up and fill the void.
He's taking this in stride too, so much so that a 20-year-old who got some modest notice for a good training camp is now making the Islanders wonder if the 98th pick in the 2022 draft could become an NHL regular much sooner than they thought.
It's not every day you see an AHL call-up average more than 24 minutes in his second and third NHL games. That's a number reserved for elite defensemen, the Drew Doughtys or Adam Foxes — guys who've skipped over the AHL, gone straight into the big league and, after a couple of years' experience, played huge minutes to shut down opposing top lines and help on special teams.
You simply never see what George has done in his first week in the NHL.
Heading into Tuesday's game, he was averaging 21:11 of even-strength ice time, getting basically zero PP or PK shifts. Down to veteran minor-leaguers Dennis Cholowski and Grant Hutton on the third pair and having seen just one game from Samuel Bolduc before sending him back to Bridgeport, the Islanders needed a lefthanded defenseman to eat some minutes and give the three regular righties in the lineup a breather.
George has done more than that. He's held his own against decent forwards from the Senators and Devils , and Patrick Roy and Islanders assistant coach Tommy Albelin keep sending him over the boards in pressure situations.
"I was just rolling," George said of his first night over 20 minutes, on Thursday in Ottawa. "Once you get into the game, it's just kind of like, I'm just focused in on the game and not really thinking about too much extra stuff. I just go and go and then, when you see the minutes after the game, I was pretty pleased."
Playing in London is certainly good preparation, given that the Hunter clan — Mark Hunter is the Knights' GM, Dale is head coach and Dylan has been an assistant for 13 years — have had the Knights in the hunt for an OHL championship ever since the brothers bought the franchise 24 years ago. George's three years there were no different, and how he learned under Dale and Dylan Hunter certainly helped prepare him for this unlikely call-up and stretch with the Islanders.
George has incredible skating skill and solid offensive instincts, but that wasn't normally his first assignment in London.
"His first couple years, we had ( Canadiens 2021 first-round pick) Logan Mailloux," Dylan Hunter said. "Then we had ( Sharks 2024 first-rounder) Sam Dickinson and ( Flyers 2023 first-rounder) Oliver Bonk. That meant 'G' wasn't going to be a first-unit power-play guy, and he never complained once. He made it his mission to be the best penalty killer, the best shutdown D-man we had.
"And being that offense-first D-man isn't necessarily going to give you the fastest route to the NHL. We have a lot of history to show our young guys, from having more stay-at-home guys like Dan Girardi and Marc Methot here a while back who had long NHL careers and didn't take too long to get established. Now we have Isaiah, even if it was a little more unexpected."
For George, learning under the Hunters was the perfect training. He did manage a laugh when reminded how Islanders fans of a certain vintage view Dale Hunter — the Pierre Turgeon incident was 11 years before George was born, by the way — but the young defenseman uses an awful lot of what he learned in London right now.
"He's a great coach, a great guy," George said of Dale Hunter. "Great with the X's and O's. Every game, he's got the perfect game plan for us and when we execute it we have a lot of success. I wouldn't change a thing about my time there."
The other benefit George got from playing on such high-level London teams was big minutes in important games. The Knights went to the Memorial Cup final last spring, losing to host Saginaw, but that meant George got almost 90 games last season as a 20-plus-minute, top-pair defenseman.
His new partner can relate to having games like that at the amateur level to prepare you for what's to come as a pro.
"You can't really get that experience anywhere else when you're that age," said Noah Dobson , who played major minutes in back-to-back Memorial Cup runs before he joined the Islanders at 19. "It's a totally different league, but it's playing against the top guys at your level in the biggest moments. It just helps you know how to manage and handle the pressure of playing your first NHL game — things like that. He's shown he can handle these situations already."
And George, whose skating is already NHL-level, has a maturity that definitely resembles Dobson's.
"You always try to teach the young guys to treat the third game of the season like it's a Stanley Cup Final or a Memorial Cup final," Dylan Hunter said. "Play every game, every shift, like it matters. 'G' always had the ability to play responsibly and he took that attitude to heart. He brought his lunch pail to work every day — never too high or too low. He was always incredibly mature from the time he got here at 17."
The current Islanders road trip may represent a new test for George. He's already shown he can handle road matchups that the Islanders can't dictate, but a five-game, 11-day trip through three time zones isn't exactly an OHL standard. The bumps in the road will come and they will surely get bigger. When Alex Romanov returns, George will get knocked down the depth chart and probably see his minutes go down.
When Adam Pelech returns in a month, George may go back to Bridgeport to continue a more normal development path for his first pro season. Or he could go back sooner if things take a turn for the worse.
But the biggest thing this very small sample size has given the Islanders is the thought that George could be a regular NHL defenseman next season, which would at the very least alleviate concerns about finding a third left-handed defenseman to replace Mike Reilly , who is only signed through the end of this season. Bolduc was long thought to be next in line, but his worrisome trend the past few years has likely changed the organization's thinking.
General manager Lou Lamoriello could even think beyond the third pair if the Islanders continue to see calm and simplicity from George — they could entertain a trade of Pelech or Ryan Pulock this offseason to begin remaking their defense as a more mobile group.
It's still very, very early for George. But he passed the first few NHL tests impressively, and that opens the door to new possibilities for him and for the team.
"It's comforting for a coach to have someone like him," Dylan Hunter said. "He doesn't get rattled. You can always tell pretty early on if a guy has it or he doesn't, and we knew it early on with Isaiah. Pretty surprised and happy it's coming for him at that level already."
(Top photo: Al Bello / )
