A loss straight from the Lane Lambert playbook and a game the Islanders could ill-afford to give away right as they were getting things back on track.
It is still five points of six — all things considered, a good three games — for the Islanders after a 4-3 overtime loss to the Devils that was on course for a 3-1 Isles victory until things went haywire in the last five minutes on Saturday night.
But it is the two points the Islanders handed to a divisional opponent that they need to learn from.
Because, once again, here were the Islanders in the last five minutes of a game that appeared on the precipice of being over, doing everything but dealing a final blow and then wondering how it could have gotten away from them.
“We need to defend better around our net,” coach Patrick Roy said after Stefan Noesen tied the game late by banking a puck off Grant Hutton’s skate in the crease before Jack Hughes won it for the Devils in overtime. “They pick up rebounds, so we gotta find a way to box them out and put our hands on those pucks and do a little bit better job.
“We can’t throw those pucks away. We gotta eat those pucks and swarm it. Kill the clock. When they pull the goalie, it’s the clock. It was 1:06 or [1:10], whatever it was [left] and you need to kill the clock. Don’t get rid of the puck. Eat the puck if you don’t have a play.”
Roy wants his team to grow more confidence in these late-game situations, which have been a constant issue since last season. Simultaneously, though, he said he noticed nothing different about the Islanders when Dawson Mercer cut what had been a 3-1 lead to 3-2 with 4:27 to go.
“[Was] our ass tight, you mean? No. Not at all,” he said. “I felt great. I felt confident that we were going to win the game.”
So, too, to hear them tell it, did the players. They had weathered an opening 40 minutes that fell below their standard and played their best hockey in the third to build a lead. They were on their way to a third straight win with five regulars out of the lineup — no small feat.
“I’m glad the way that we responded in the first half of the game, second half of the second [period] and in the third, we played really good hockey,” Casey Cizikas said. “But that one stings.”
The Islanders had spent the early goings relying on Ilya Sorokin’s excellence, the goalie keeping them in the game when there was no forecheck to speak of and all the Isles could do was try their best to keep a high-powered Devils attack to the outside.
Simon Holmstrom and Hughes traded goals in the first and second periods before Dennis Cholowski broke the 1-1 deadlock at 10:29 of the third, strolling down the slot and snapping in Holmstrom’s feed to make it 2-1.
Brock Nelson quickly extended the lead, making it 3-1 just two minutes later by finishing Kyle Palmieri’s feed off the rush.
The Islanders, it appeared, had survived the first two periods in order to thrive in the third. If anything, this looked like an example of them putting away the late-game ghosts of last season.
Not so.
“You knew they were gonna have a push,” Palmieri said. “We came out in the third and played our best period of the night, found a way to get up and those are ones you gotta find a way to protect those leads.”
After Mercer’s goal, the Devils tied the game skating at six-on-five when Noesen banked the puck off Hutton and in.
Then 2:35 into overtime, Hughes got behind the Islanders off the rush and buried Dougie Hamilton’s feed into the net, completing a mess of a loss.
So instead of heading to Edmonton on a three-game winning streak with the wind at their backs, the Islanders will do so thinking about how they let this one slip through their fingers.
They have netted five points out of six. And it will leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
“We managed to take a 3-1 lead, unfortunately we couldn’t close,” Roy said. “They scored on an empty-netter. Need to find a way to close those games.”
