The Islanders managed to salvage a point on Sunday afternoon.
But if their season has come to that sort of moral victory, finding the positives from a home loss to Montreal, then rock bottom must look a whole lot like the scene at UBS Arena following a shootout in which Brock Nelson’s last final attempt was stoned by Andrew Hammond, a goaltender whose last NHL action came in April 2018.
Hands in his pockets, Barry Trotz followed his players to the exits quickly after that. And the fans — at least the ones not wearing red — made a beeline for the exits.
After the latest embarrassment of this Islanders season, a 3-2 shootout to the Canadiens — who became the last team in the NHL to get to double-digit wins with Sunday’s victory — there can be no more sugarcoating, no more veneer of optimism or wondering what if the Islanders do turn it around. After 45 games, the Islanders are 18-20-7. In the last three weeks, they have lost at home to two of the three worst teams in the league.
“We stuck with it, found a way to get the one [point],” Josh Bailey said, squeezing a silver lining from defeat. “We’ll take it and move onto the next one.”
It can, technically, get worse. Similarly, the Islanders can, technically, still make the playoffs. Both of those scenarios, though, are quite hard to imagine.
The start was bad. The finish was bad. The in-between, mostly, was bad.
Nelson gave the Islanders some badly needed momentum late in the third, tying the game at two on a goal he created all by himself with just under three minutes left in the game. But that momentum didn’t last long.
In the three-on-three overtime, the Islanders struggled to get a shot off, hunting for the perfect look instead of putting pucks on net. In the shootout, Mathew Barzal and Nelson were both stopped by Hammond while Rem Pitlick netted the winner for the Canadiens.
That capped a day in which the Islanders started poorly, finished poorly and, for most of the in-between, struggled.
“[They] played that frustrating style, got pucks in, were on the right side of pucks, had layers, had numbers through the neutral zone,” Islanders coach Barry Trotz said. “We tried to stickhandle through that.”
Too often, those endeavors ended before reaching Montreal’s blue line.
That is as familiar a frustration for the Islanders as giving up the opener, which they did for the 11th time in 12 games, as Jeff Petry’s shot from the point ricochet off Ilya Sorokin’s pad and in at 9:01 of the first.
The Islanders got that one back after Kyle Palmieri deposited a rebound at 1:29 of the second on the power play, but their momentum wouldn’t last. At 18:49 of the period, Josh Anderson was left all alone in the lower left circle and picked his spot for a wrist shot past Sorokin.
Hammond, playing his first NHL game in 1,400 days, finished the afternoon with an impressive 30 saves to Sorokin’s 25.
Asked if they had underestimated the Canadiens, Trotz said he thought not, noting that Montreal has played with “more confidence” since installing Martin St. Louis as interim head coach. Exactly what, then, is plaguing the Islanders, he couldn’t put a finger on.
“When you talk about the Islanders in the last few years, I think everybody says, ‘We don’t get it. They get more out of, it’s about the sum of their parts all together and everybody’s had career years,’ ” Trotz said. “This year, we fell off and some guys haven’t had career years. We need everybody.
“That’s how you right the ship.”
It’s not a mathematical death knell to their season, so in that sense, the ship can still be righted. But in any other, 2021-22 can be considered over and done with for the Islanders. They’re 17 points out of the postseason and just lost at home to the worst team in the league.
Just as important, this does not have the look of a team showing enough fight to claw back in the race. The Islanders say they know what they’re capable of, but the moments in which they’ve played like it have been few and far between.
Following Thursday’s win over the Bruins, Mat Barzal said the Islanders had played “championship-caliber” hockey.
That begs the question, exactly what sort of caliber of hockey did they play on Sunday?
One imagines they wouldn’t like the answer to that one.
