Islanders coaches must pare down the roster

The preseason games are done and now it's time for some hard choices from the Islanders' brain trust.

The Isles finished off their preseason schedule here against the Bruins Friday night, fielding a roster composed mostly of players who will be playing at Webster Bank Arena for the AHL Sound Tigers this season. But that doesn't mean Jack Capuano and his staff are done evaluating.

"We still have some decisions," Capuano said before the game. "We'll get down to one group for practice [Saturday] and let some guys know where they're going to be going forward. We've evaluated a lot of practices as well as the games. We'll still have some things to do before we get down to the final [23] on Tuesday."

In addition to figuring out who belongs on the 23-man roster that must be submitted to the NHL by 5 p.m. Tuesday -- Saturday's cuts likely will not get the Islanders down to 23, so the last difficult decisions might have to wait -- Capuano and general manager Garth Snow must find four capable lines and three defense pairs before Friday's opener against the Hurricanes in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Of the very few locks for the NHL roster to play Friday night, Brock Nelson skated with John Tavares and Kyle Okposo. Tavares and Okposo, who missed the final 22 and 10 games last season, have played five of the seven preseason games. Nelson was the fifth different player to skate with them.

The trio didn't produce much through 30-plus minutes before Nelson took a bad hit into the boards from Bruins defenseman Kevan Miller. Nelson needed five stitches and missed the remainder of the second, and Miller was given a major and game misconduct.

Notes & quotes: Okposo had a power-play goal as the Isles fell to the Bruins, 6-1, before a sellout crowd of 8,600 . . . Ryan Pulock (lower body) and Calvin de Haan (upper body) skated, but neither practiced fully. Casey Cizikas (back) did practice. Michael Grabner (upper body) and Lubomir Visnovsky (back) remained off the ice.