Isles facing dire straits
When Doug Weight first took over as interim head coach of the Islanders on Jan. 17, he brought with him a hopeful, if not wistful, optimism. Now, after his team clawed back into the playoff picture, then went through a lull of 35-1 that has them again on the outside looking in, the outlook is desperate.
“With my soul, I want to get in the playoffs,” Weight said on Tuesday, his voice ragged, exhaustion just below the surface as his team had slipped to four points behind the Bruins for the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference, with the Lightning in between, holding a one-point advantage over Weight’s squad.
“We’re going to keep working,” Weight said.
For the past two months, the next game always was the biggest of the season for the Islanders, and that only gets more true with seven remaining. It continues with a back-to-back starting Thursday in Philadelphia against a Flyers team that is doing everything inside and outside the rules to keep its playoff hopes alive, two points behind the Islanders and six behind Boston. The last-place Devils in Brooklyn on Friday will hardly be a pushover, as well.
“It’s been fun because if you said nine weeks ago — whatever it is now, time’s flying — that we would be within a game of being in the playoffs and in this hunt, we would take it,” Weight said. “Now we’ve got to grasp it and acknowledge that we’re going through a rough time right now. We’ve got to get out of it. It gets exhausting.”
Weight has tried to mitigate that exhaustion with depth, giving bigger roles to young players such as forwards Josh Ho-Sang and Anthony Beauvillier. He also will get a boost when veteran defenseman Johnny Boychuk returns, which should be Thursday after a 12game absence due to a lower-body injury.
That will alleviate some of the pressure on the young defensemen currently in the lineup, Scott Mayfield and Adam Pelech. Weight also has not ruled out the chance another young blueliner with NHL experience, Ryan Pulock, could come up from AHL Bridgeport to bring a right-handed shot to the point of the struggling power play. But there also are nagging injuries being played through by the likes of regular forwards Josh Bailey, Cal Clutterbuck and Casey Cizikas, while reliable winger Nikolay Kulemin remains sidelined with an upperbody injury.
Desperation is the word, because it’s all the Islanders have left.
“You have to find that inner piece of your stomach that turns when something doesn’t happen right,” Weight said. “We have a good group of guys, we have experience, we have youth. You want to have a bowl of nails for lunch instead of a bowl of soup.”