EDMONTON, Alberta — When Isaiah George was 17, a rookie in the Ontario Hockey League with the London Knights, injuries forced the coaching staff to move him up to the top defense pair.
George had made a good impression. He worked hard and had a good personality. The coaching staff liked him.
But there was, naturally, some question about how he would handle the assignment, which came in a rivalry game at Kitchener.
London ended up losing, but George opened some eyes in the process.
“Just being in that barn, nothing really knocks him off,” Dylan Hunter, who coaches defensemen for the Knights, told The Post over the phone Tuesday. “He’s so stable in that sense. So when you saw him do that at 17, go against a top line — they were a very good team — being able to hold his own, we knew we had something there.
“Then we were like, all of a sudden, ‘OK, this guy, he could be something. He could be a minutes-eater here.’ He doesn’t really get razzled or frazzled at all.”
The parallels to the situation in which George finds himself three years later — getting called up to the Islanders, almost immediately getting thrown onto the top pair and thriving — are obvious.
There was little choice other than to throw the 20-year-old George into the fire, but nobody expected him to be so unflappable so quickly.
His fourth NHL game was Tuesday night against the Oilers, and it is already becoming clear that if he keeps it up, the Islanders will need to make room for him in the lineup once they get healthy.
“I write it down. I tell myself that I can play at this level and be successful,” George told The Post. “So I always had that internal belief and put it in my mind. Definitely looking at the pathway, looking at the direction that most players take, I was definitely surprised to get that opportunity this early.”
What speaks particularly on George is that, asked where he needed to improve most at the start of his junior career, Hunter cites breakouts and moving the puck.
Now, at the start of his NHL career, it has been George’s ability to escape the defensive zone and transport the puck up ice which has stood out most.
“That’s learned. That’s just a credit to him,” Hunter said. “Some guys are just deceptive like that. He’s really learned what he can do and what he can’t. What he gets away with, obviously, no one could have predicted him being up and doing as well as he has in the first four games. But it’s a good bar for our young guys to see, too, cause you put the work in.”
George, who was still looking for his first NHL point going into Tuesday night, is a defensive defenseman and he knows it.
Hunter said that last season, when the Knights went to the Memorial Cup, George never came to him asking for power-play minutes, though he might have accommodate him had he done so.
Rather, he wanted his penalty-kill pair to be the best on the team. He also adapted early to playing his off side, listening to advice that it would suit him well in the NHL to be able to do so.
“His humility is outstanding,” Hunter said. “Just beyond his years.”
It is still exceedingly early in George’s career, and it is a matter of time before he looks like a rookie in the NHL.
That is OK and that is expected. But he is changing the paradigm within the organization with every successful shift, forcing everybody to account for himself when the near-universal assumption was that he would spend this season adjusting to the AHL.
“Every time I go on the ice, I’ve been trying to earn that next shift and next game,” George said. “So that’s kinda been the mindset. Each time I go out there, I’m trying to earn the next opportunity. That’s been my main focus.”