Noah Dobson’s and Alexander Romanov’s stalls sit next to each other in the Islanders’ locker room, an obvious nod to the organization’s intentions when they brought in Romanov over the summer.

Play one 23-year-old next to the other, let them develop together and build a second defense pair that can be on Long Island for the long term. Of course, it was never going to be so easy as that, and when Romanov and Dobson were split up on Nov. 21 in Toronto after a start to the season in which they didn’t quite seem on the same page, it was a logical course of action.

What looked at the time like a temporary fix, though, has become permanent. Romanov and Scott Mayfield have turned into the second pair (and while Adam Pelech was out, the first pair); Dobson and Sebastian Aho are the third. At this point, though, the results are no better than they were with the initial configuration, and Dobson is getting the short end of the stick in a way that is negatively impacting his development.

To oversimplify, the Islanders now have a second pair that is defense-focused and a third pair that is offense-focused. Most of the numbers comparing the early-season pairs and the current pairs are similar, but there is a massive difference in how often they’re starting in the offensive zone. That is not bad in isolation — there might be some opponents against which it is preferable — but on net, the Islanders would do better with some balance.