Former Olympians Begin to Deliver : Hockey: LaFontaine and Flatley step forward to lead the New York Islanders back to respectability.

They arrived together. Not only did they report at the same time and from the same place but with the same first name. Pat LaFontaine and Patrick Flatley represented the future for a team that still held the Stanley Cup -- and the entire National Hockey League -- captive.

Expectations were enormous for the two first-round draft choices who joined the Islanders at the end of the 1984 Olympics. A center, LaFontaine was a legendary scorer in the junior ranks and the star of the U.S. team. Flatley was a strong winger in the Islanders tradition of Nystrom, Gillies and Tonelli and a catalyst on the Canadian club that reached the medal round in Sarajevo.

Although the Islanders were driving toward what they hoped would be a fifth consecutive championship when LaFontaine and Flatley made their debuts on Feb. 29 of leap year, the presence of the newcomers was duly noted not only by the media but by their teammates. The state of professional anxiety may have been best expressed by Anders Kallur, a resourceful Swedish winger with a wry sense of humor. “He’s Flatley,” he veteran noted. “I’m history.”

Kallur was only slightly premature. He lasted another season before he was released. By then, Flatley and LaFontaine had played themselves into regular roles. But history hasn’t been entirely kind to either man or, for that matter, to the Islanders. That fifth Cup was denied them in the championship series in ‘84, and the team hasn’t caught a glimpse of the trophy in the intervening years.

As the new decade begins, however, LaFontaine and Flatley find themselves as key figures on a club that seems to have reversed its slide on the hockey graph and begun the climb back to respectability. After several productive but ultimately frustrating seasons, LaFontaine has raised his game to another level, has become a player whose skills and persistence place him among the elite scorers in the league. And Flatley, recovered from reconstructive surgery on his right knee, has evolved into the player the Islanders ordered from central casting during their years of dominance.

“He’s playing now like we hoped he would when we drafted him,” General Manager Bill Torrey said. “He’s very strong along the boards, very tough in the corners, and he controls the puck so well. This is probably his best year, his most consistent.”

LaFontaine’s success has been a matter of record: 35 goals in 41 games, including two in the Islanders’ 5-3 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday night at Nassau Coliseum. To appreciate Flatley’s contribution takes a practiced eye. “He does so many things most people don’t notice,” said LaFontaine, who is perhaps his biggest booster. “But his teammates notice, and they respect him. We call hi m ‘Mission Man’ because he comes to work every night, even when he’s hurt.”

It was almost two years ago that Flatley damaged the knee, threatening his career. He returned to the Islanders’ lineup on Dec. 20, 1988. According to Al Arbour, whatever the physical cost of the injury, the man has learned to compensate. “He’s playing with his head,” the coach said. “He does all the little things out there. He’s a real driving force and an inspiration to our team.”

Flatley chooses not to look back. “When I do,” he said, “I get depressed.” He has concentrated his efforts on being the best Patrick Flatley he can be at 26.

“When I got the injury,” he said of the arduous rehabilitation, “I looked at it as a job. My job was to get better. I was fortunate to have successful surgery. Without it, having the attitude of God wouldn’t have helped.”

In his first full season in three years, Flatley has been an effective checker, a superb grinder, an aggressive penalty-killer. He also is tied for third in scoring on a team that, from an offensive standpoint, is painfully unbalanced. Although Torrey pointed to a Kings shot that Flatley blocked in the third period, with the Islanders clinging to a one-goal lead, as evidence of his value, the man still has a way with the puck, as he demonstrated with a nifty assist on LaFontaine’s first goal.

Once upon a time, during Flatley’s first playoff experience in 1984, it seemed the Islanders might have gotten even more than they bargained for. He had nine goals and six assists in 21 games. “I don’t know if it’s karma or what,” Flatley decided, “but sometimes you go out there and things go incredibly well. The major difference between a Wayne Gretzky and others is that, with him, it happens every single night.”

The man smiled at the line. But there was no false modesty in his assessment of the play on which he stripped the puck from a defenseman in the Kings’ zone and slipped a blind, backhanded pass onto the stick of the center. It led directly to another Pat trick, a quick LaFontaine wrist shot that caught goaltender Mario Gosselin by surprise. “I’ve made plays like that before,” Flatley said.

And so he has. But it was characteristic of the man that he would be feeding a teammate. After all, Flatley spent the summer feeding the public. He helped his brother, Wayne, run Big Apple Bagels in Elmwood Park.

“The guys don’t eat breakfast when we go to Chicago now,” LaFontaine said. “Flats brings about 50 bagels and all kinds of cream cheese to the skate. They’re really great.”

After daily eight-hour shifts on his feet, Flatley said, he appreciates the work of waiters and waitresses. He also has learned to savor the immediate rewards of the three hours or less he spends on skates. The two points he and his teammates earned on Tuesday night for their seventh victory in the last eight games lifted the club out of the Patrick Division cellar for the first time in two months. Like the dough over which he labored in the summer, the Islanders appear to be on the rise.