CHICAGO — The Islanders closed the book on 2025 with two of their ugliest points of the year.
They took their third win in four, 3-2 over the Blackhawks on Tuesday night at the United Center on Bo Horvat’s shootout winner in the final game of a calendar year whose second half could not have looked more different from its first.
The Islanders went from a franchise that appeared to be spinning its wheels, missing the playoffs and missing a discernible plan for the future, to having one of the NHL’s most exciting young cores along with a team that is sitting in second place in the Metropolitan Division as it ends 2025.
After this one, though, the Islanders were the opposite of excited after blowing a 2-0 lead, watching the Blackhawks draw iron four times and escaping with a victory that coach Patrick Roy called “hard to watch” at points.
He wasn’t the only one to engage in some pointed self-criticism.
“We need to look in the mirror and know it wasn’t good enough,” Ryan Pulock told The Post. “We can’t play like that every night and expect to win.”
“We kind of relaxed a little bit,” Emil Heineman told The Post.
Their 2-0 lead went kaput in the last five minutes of the second period when consistent pressure from the Blackhawks finally paid off.
Oliver Moore fed Teuvo Teravainen for a right-circle one-timer at 15:31 of the period then after Horvat took a four-minute high-sticking double minor, Nick Lardis made the Islanders pay with just 1.7 seconds to go in the second.
Lardis’ goal was from almost the same spot as Teravainen’s, and with Moore getting the assist again.
That tied a game the Islanders had controlled early on, forcing them to spend the final 20 minutes working for their last points of 2025.
They were loose in the defensive zone, failed to establish a forecheck and sloppy with the puck. Roy’s experiments with the lines, namely putting Mathew Barzal on Horvat’s wing for just the fourth time this season and putting Anthony Duclair on the fourth line in place of Kyle MacLean, did not have the intended results.
“The transition was not as good, breakout was not as good,” Roy said. “We did a lot of East/West play instead of playing north.”
The Islanders were lucky to have even come away with a point after Nick Foligno drew iron on an attempt from inside the blue paint with an open net and seconds left in regulation. Ryan Greene had an open net in overtime too on a cross-ice feed that had David Rittich beaten, but missed wide.
On top of that, the Islanders failed to generate much of anything on a four-on-three power play in overtime after Levshunov tripped Heineman.
Rittich, who was perfect in the shootout after stopping 17 shots in regulation and overtime, made sure they didn’t have to pay.
“I can’t swear, but s- -t happens, right?” the goaltender said.
Upset as the Islanders were about their effort — and right as they were to be so — there was still the fact that they got away with two points on the road.
“You have to find ways to win those games. Those ugly ones, I call it,” Roy said. “You’d rather have them on your side than on the other side. At the end of the year we’re not going to remember [how]. We’re going to look at the standings and we’re going to say maybe that was a big two points.”
In the symbolism category, the Islanders also won this game in the very same building where, two seasons ago, a pitiful effort was the final straw for then-coach Lane Lambert, a low point of the era that ended when the lottery balls dropped their way and Mathieu Darche was hired as general manager over the span of a few weeks in May.
That Cal Ritchie scored and Matthew Schaefer got the secondary assist on the Islanders’ two goals was also a nice feather in the cap. Schaefer’s power-play apple on Horvat’s goal made him the youngest defenseman in history to get 25 points.
Perfect it was not, but oh how things have changed for this organization in such a short time.
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