Crowned by Kings
Islanders sunk by lack of offense, sloppy 2nd period
As good as the Islanders have been over their past 12 games, as much as it is impossible to win every time they take the ice, each loss in a playoff race this close seems to bear as much emotional weight as multiple victories.
The Islanders are 7-2-3 in since Jan. 27, good enough to have changed their playoff equation from bad to something near manageable, but a 3-2 loss to the Kings on Friday at UBS Arena to split a two-game homestand left a bitter taste nonetheless.
The Islanders now head out for games at Winnipeg and Minnesota needing to recover some momentum, and recover it quickly.
In the first two games without Mathew Barzal, the Islanders managed to eke out victories by leaning on their defense and goalie Ilya Sorokin. On Friday, they missed Barzal’s offensive punch and finished with just 18 attempts on net.
“When we’re going good, we’re playing fast, getting pucks north, getting in on the forecheck,” Noah Dobson told The Post. “I think a lot of it started with too many dump-[ins] right to their goalie. We weren’t able to get on the forecheck and hound their D and made it a little too easy for them on the breakouts.”
That take echoed through the Islanders’ room on Friday: They did not have enough forecheck, and when they did get the puck deep, it went to the wrong areas.
“Just not enough sustained [pressure] from us,” Zach Parise told The Post. “I feel like they did a good job clogging up the neutral zone and when we did dump it in, we just weren’t able to continually keep pressure on them. They broke out pretty well on us.”
Early in the game, it looked as if the Islanders might be able to bog the Kings down into a lowevent contest. But the dam broke in a badly lopsided second period, with the Kings scoring three times in a six-minute span to take a 3-0 lead.
Phillip Danault was the first to score, getting on his own rebound after he deflected a Viktor Arvidsson shot at 6:40. Less than two minutes later, after Sebastian Aho failed to corral a puck at the blue line, it sprung Rasmus Kupari and Arthur Kaliyev for a two-onone, and Kaliyev converted. At 12:14, Gabe Vilardi put the icing on the cake with a floating shot that beat Sorokin through traffic.
“They got some momentum and we made a couple of mistakes and they made us pay for it,” Islanders coach Lane Lambert said. “They were structurally good and they made it very difficult for us to get on the forecheck.”
For too much of this game, the Islanders looked out of gas and out of ideas offensively. Dobson’s one-timer on the power play got the Islanders on the board at 16:34 of the second period and injected some life into a crowd that was growing restless. But despite their first goal on the man advantage since Barzal’s injury, the Islanders couldn’t gain any momentum in the ensuing shifts.
Adam Pelech scored a flukey goal off Matt Roy’s skate to cut the Kings’ lead to one with just under five minutes to go, but it came as too little, too late. Even at six-on-five, they couldn’t mount much of an attack on Jonathan Quick.
Whether as a result of the Kings’ defense or their own depletion on offense, the Islanders looked for too much of the 60 minutes like a team that was missing a spark. It felt a little bit as if they had run into the wall of what their reality without Barzal could look like.
The Islanders have managed the past month, including the games without Barzal, about as well as can be expected. Their playoff outlook is better than was did a week ago, and not insignificantly so. But the math — especially those pesky games in hand — requires that they refuse to let up with 20 games left in the season.
It does not matter who is injured, it does not matter how well they played last week and it does not matter what teams they play this week. One loss might happen, but it cannot turn into a string of defeats. Not if the season is to extend past April 12.
“Just one of those nights,” Dobson said.
The Islanders need him to be right.