Isles down to AHL blue line

Even the Islanders’ good news comes with bad news.

Two-and-a-half hours before puck drop on Wednesday night against the Rangers, general manager Lou Lamoriello appeared on a Zoom call to announce that the Isles hadn’t received any additional positive COVID-19 tests. But just after 7 p.m, the team announced that Noah Dobson would miss the game, saying the defenseman was dayto-day with a lowerbody injury.

That left the Isles with three pairings that might as well be playing in Bridgeport: Robin Salo and Scott Mayfield, Sebastian Aho and Grant Hutton, Thomas Hickey and Paul LaDue. Mayfield is the only player of that group who started the year as a regular.

The Isles got to this point through a combination of COVID-19 and injury. In the former category: Adam Pelech, Andy Greene, Zdeno Chara. In the latter: Ryan Pulock and Dobson.

“It’s not really a challenge to get up to speed and everything cause I feel like everybody’s doing — all the coaches, players, staff — are doing a good job of helping us out if there’s questions or whatever,” Aho said. “But of course it’s challenging in the way that we have a lot of guys that have gone down right now but we have a lot of good guys that [have] stepped up at the moment.”

The lack of familiarity was exposed with miscommunications a number of times, and a defensive breakdown led directly to the Rangers’ third goal when LaDue turned it over in the neutral zone, leading to an odd-man rush on which Kevin Rooney scored.

Another call-up, Otto Koivula, had a neutral-zone turnover of his own that led straight to Rooney’s second-period goal.

➤ Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s frustration boiled over with 1:51 to go in the game, when he dropped the gloves with Alexis Lafreniere after getting tripped, possibly in retaliation for his hit earlier in the period on Ryan Lindgren.

➤ Semyon Varlamov’s streak of 168:26 without giving up a goal to the Rangers ended with Chris Kreider’s second period goal.