Palmieri hat trick paces Isles’ huge win over B’s
The Islanders’ playoff push is for real.
Facing one of the best teams in hockey with a chance to win three straight for the first time since December, the Islanders not only took two points, but produced an emphatic and excellent 5-1 victory over the Bruins on the back of a first-period natural hat trick from Kyle Palmieri.
The transformation of the Isles under Patrick Roy took time, but Saturday — if it proves sustainable — looked like a formidable product.
All four of the forward lines forechecked, played below the hash marks and spent time in the offensive zone. The Islanders — a team that is consistently criticized for lack of speed — played just as quickly as the Bruins. They crashed the net. The penalty kill did not cave in.
On an all-around basis, it qualified as the best 60 minutes of the season by a country mile.
“Probably couldn’t have drawn it up much better,” Palmieri said.
“Maybe the best game of the season, in recent memory,” Brock Nelson said.
“I think we saw a team that’s competing and that wants to keep climbing,” Jean-Gabriel Pageau said. “And that’s our focus.”
Though the Flyers and Lightning kept pace with wins, the Islanders have games in hand over both teams and gained two points on the Red Wings, who lost to Florida. More important than the standings is that they are showing something on the ice that makes the five-point gap to Philadelphia look like something they can bridge.
Palmeri’s hat trick, the fastest to start a game in Islanders history and their first of the season, started 3:32 into the match when he beat Linus Ullmark off the rush. Just less than two minutes later, following James van Riemsdyk’s penalty for holding, Palmieri banged in a rebound from Bo Horvat to make it 2-0. Then at the 12:19 mark, he was at the net again to clean up Ryan Pulock’s initial shot.
It was the first hat trick by an Islander in the first period since Jason Blake on Feb. 27, 2007, against Philadelphia, and the first for Palmieri since Oct. 30, 2019, when he was with the Devils.
And Palmieri was not done yet, notching his fourth point of the night just 46 seconds into the second period when Anders Lee finished an odd-man rush by scoring off his own rebound.
“I think we made our decisions quick and we were executing,” Palmieri said. “We were getting the puck up fast. The D did a great job, and the centers, of being in spots where we can break the puck out and not give them too much in the D-zone. So credit to them.”
If there were lingering nightmares of the collapses that have been commonplace for the Islanders at points this season, if anyone at UBS Arena did not feel safe from there, they surely did when Brock Nelson scored to make it 5-0 later in the second.
A perfect game was out of reach, with Mason McLaughlin spoiling Ilya Sorokin’s shutout. But this was not far off.
The Islanders still have a long way to go before they are on the right side of the playoff cutline. But if any small notion of selling at the trade deadline was in the back of general manager Lou Lamoriello’s mind, it is surely gone now.
“I think it’s confidence right now and the fact that they’re playing free,” Roy said. “They don’t think. It’s hard to put it all in the same sentence. Structure, mindset, fundamentals. It’s hard. It takes time. I think that’s what we did. We kind of built around this.
“Sometimes you want a great start when a coach comes in and puts a Band-Aid on it, but that’s not how it works. It’s to play the right way and I think right now, we’re playing the right way.”
The Islanders cannot take their foot off the gas now. But they appear to be gathering the momentum necessary to make a run over the season’s last six weeks.
Not a moment too soon.