Trouba banned 2 games for elbow Improved effort, same result as Isles fall in OT
OTTAWA, Ontario — The Rangers will be without their captain, Jacob Trouba, for the next two games.
Trouba was suspended after having a phone hearing with the NHL Department of Player Safety on Saturday for an elbow he threw against Golden Knights forward Pavel Dorofeyev in the Rangers’ 5-2 loss at the Garden on Friday night.
The play was not penalized during the game.
“That’s a big piece on our back end,” head coach Peter Laviolette said of losing Trouba, who has three goals and 16 assists through 48 games, before the Rangers took a 7-2 win over the Senators. “His leadership, his defense, his physicality. Plays against other teams top lines. That’s a piece that is missing. An opportunity for others to step up.
“We’ll certainly miss him tonight [against Ottawa], but he’ll be back in a couple games.”
As a result, Zac Jones drew back into the lineup for the first time since Jan. 20 and just the third time in the last 21 games.
Ryan Lindgren, who was knocked out of Friday night’s game in the first period following a hit into the boards by Vegas wing Keegan Kolesar, was considered to be a game-time decision Friday. Despite taking the ice for warmups, Lindgren ultimately didn’t play and Connor Mackey got the call.
Laviolette coached his 1,479th game, which tied him with Darryl Sutter for the ninth most in NHL history. With Saturday night’s win, Laviolette tied Al Arbour for the seventh-most wins in NHL history by a head coach (782).
The Rangers’ All-Star break begins Sunday. While Igor Shesterkin and Vincent Trocheck are participating in the NHL’S All-Star weekend activities in Toronto, the rest of the team will have a few days off before returning to practice. They’ll kick off the final 33 games of the season with home contests against the Avalanche on Feb. 5 and Lightning on Feb. 7.
The vibe around the Islanders has been completely different over the past seven days.
The results, however, have not changed all that much.
After dropping their last game before the All-Star break, 3-2 in overtime to the Panthers on Saturday night at UBS Arena, the Islanders are just 1-2-1 under new coach Patrick Roy. And parallel to the rest of the season, all three losses have been by one goal after Oliver Ekman-Larsson notched the winner for Florida 1:55 into the extra period.
“I love the progression of our team, I really do,” Roy said. “I like the fact that tonight it looked like a team that played a playoff hockey game. … Listen, we were a long way [away], and I think we’re getting closer to where we want to be.”
The Islanders have certainly looked much more engaged under Roy than they did for Lane Lambert, and the numbers have mostly backed up the eye test. But they enter the All-Star break in fourth place in the Metropolitan Division, with a four-point gap between them and the Flyers in the Metro and a five-point gap to the Red Wings in the wild-card race.
Saturday followed a familiar script, in which the Islanders showed some resilience throughout an ugly game, only to fall short in overtime.
Going into the final 20 minutes, momentum looked to be on the Islanders’ side after Simon Holmstrom had tied the game at one, winning a battle for the puck off a faceoff and slotting it home at the 16:29 mark of the second.
But here came the same old problems after Samuel Bolduc tripped Mackie Samoskevich at 5:12 of the third.
Matthew Tkachuk made short work of the power play, deflecting Aleksander Barkov’s shot past Semyon Varlamov for a 2-1 lead at 5:59.
Forty-nine games into the season, the Islanders have yet to kick their habit of taking costly penalties. But they nearly overcame that as well, with Kyle Palmieri converting Noah Dobson’s cross-ice feed at the 18:31 mark of the third to tie the game at two.
That got the game to overtime. But for the 12th time this year, the Islanders fell in the extra period. Ekman-Larsson finished off a breakaway when Anthony Stolarz kept play alive off Brock Nelson’s chance the other way — catching Nelson out as he went for a change.
“Probably should’ve found a way to either stop that rebound or jam it up there so they didn’t have a two-on-one going back,” Nelson said.
The game, on the whole, was a choppy and relatively low-event affair. But Varlamov turned in a 34-save effort to help keep the Islanders in it.
Unlike the past couple games, in which they dominated the puck for long periods of time, the Islanders struggled in transition against a red-hot Panthers team, which came into the night 6-2-2 over their past 10 games.
Sam Reinhart got Florida on the board at the 7:56 mark of the second, converting from the low slot on the power play from Tkachuk’s feed behind the net. But the combination of Varlamov and 24 blocked shots stopped the game from spiraling.
“I don’t like those offensive zone penalties,” Roy said. “I think when our guys start to understand we can’t take penalties in the [offensive] zone, then we’ll be fine.”
Of late, it has been the Islanders’ offense coming up short more often than their defense. Ditto for Saturday.
“I don’t think we were as good as we did, let’s say, against Vegas and Montreal in that regard,” Roy said. “They did a good job closing the wall. Sometimes, maybe our guys were a little nervous to bring that puck up. These are adjustments that, the more we’re gonna practice, I think they’re gonna feel it, and it’ll be easier along the way.”
A year ago, after a similarly bad January, Lou Lamoriello jolted the group by trading for Bo Horvat, and the Islanders surged into the playoffs.
They are hoping that the arc of 2024 will rhyme with that of 2023 after the thunderclap of Roy’s hiring.
“Everybody in this room remembers how we played down the stretch last year and found a way into the playoffs,” Palmieri said. “... We believe in each other. We believe that we can make a run down here.”