ISLES GET A GRIP
Ground Red Wings to strengthen playoff hold
ISLANDERS 4 RED WINGS 1
It will be a long time before anything feels safe, but with each passing game, the playoffs seem like a more and more likely destination for the Islanders.
After their controlled and clinical 4-1 victory Saturday over the Red Wings at UBS Arena, the Islanders are 4-1-1 since losing Mathew Barzal to a lower-body injury on Feb. 18, 32-25-8 on the season and have two more points than the slew of wild-card opposition below them.
Since they’ve played more games than everyone else in the league, games in hand are still a problem and the Islanders can ill afford a losing streak. But they are making the equation better and better just about every time they take the ice.
“That’s who we are,” said Zach Parise, whose third-period goal broke the ice in what turned into a blowout. “We’re a team, when we’re playing well, our D-zone, our neutral zone is our strength. And if those break down, we’ve got great goaltending.”
This is the week to make a statement, with games ahead against the Sabres, Penguins and Capitals — in other words, three more chances against their direct opposition in the race. On Saturday, in their first chance against such an opponent, the Red Wings, the Islanders came back in the third period to win a game they had the better of for just about all 60 minutes.
The Islanders trailed 1-0 after two periods, but it took just 2:11 of play in the third to finally convert a chance into a goal. Parise buried a rebound off Kyle Palmieri’s shot to tie the score at 1-1. By the 4:39 mark, the Islanders had taken the lead after Anders Lee deflected Hudson Fasching’s shot past Magnus Hellberg.
From there, the two mandates for the Islanders were to avoid taking penalties and to keep doing what they’d been doing.
Check, check and add Palmieri’s tip off a Noah Dobson power-play blast for good measure. That made it 3-1 with a hair under five minutes to go. A second goal from Lee with 2:38 left in the game, made the final score a bit more reflective of the game flow.
“We knew if we kept playing the way we did that we would generate our opportunities.” Lee said. “We just had to find a way to put one in. Zach got that for us tonight. He kinda alleviated some of that pressure and we rolled from there.”
Dylan Larkin gave Detroit a 1-0 lead at 18:59 of the second, converting a power-play opportunity after the Islanders lost him in front of their own net. Despite the failure to score until the third period, though, the Islanders outshot Detroit 36-23 in the game.
As has been the trend since Barzal’s injury, the Islanders continued to play structured and sound defensive hockey. They dominated possession and kept goaltender Ilya Sorokin’s job easy at five-on-five, while forcing Hellberg to work in Detroit’s net.
After Larkin’s goal, the game seem poised to be a repeat of Tuesday, when the Islanders lost 2-1 at Minnesota despite a similar effort. But this time, they got the goals to reward a strong performance, and walked away with two points to show for it.
“I thought our guys showed tremendous resolve and urgency in the third period,” coach Lane Lambert said, “understanding the situation at hand.”
The Islanders will need to deal with the stress of having played more games than their competition until nearly the end of the season — a product of a packed early part of the schedule. The more games they win, though, the less stressful that equation will be and the more likely it will be that they get into the playoffs for the first time since 2021.
As much as this coming week can still change everything, and as much as they still have a slim margin for error, things are going according to plan.
The Islanders don’t look like world-beaters, but they do look like a playoff team.