When the Islanders next take the ice on Tuesday in Pittsburgh, it will have been exactly a month since Lou Lamoriello fired Lane Lambert and hired Patrick Roy, a move designed to change the course of the season and beyond.
Now, nine games into Roy’s tenure, it feels like the Islanders need to start deciding whether to think more about this season or beyond.
The 6-5 overtime loss to the Rangers at MetLife Stadium on Sunday looked an awful lot like a lot of this team’s most gutting losses under Lambert and that is a big problem.
The Islanders held leads of 4-1 and 5-3, the latter deep into the third period.
Then, instead of continuing to take the game to the Rangers, they started to let the Rangers do the opposite.
They took bad penalties.
Their penalty kill got exposed.
The Rangers tied the game and won in overtime.
A microcosm of the last four months in front of nearly 80,000 people.
Roy was not wrong afterwards when he defended how the Islanders played and said they did a lot of good things.
The first period was excellent.
But that — and Noah Dobson’s three assists — mattered zilch in overtime when Dobson gave the puck away to Artemi Panarin, who ended it 10 seconds into the extra period.
“We got ourselves into some penalty trouble, whether we agreed with some of them or not, we weren’t able to get a kill,” Nelson said, continuing the grumbling around penalty calls that has gone on in the Isles’ room since October. “It turns out to be the difference.”
Rangers coach Peter Laviolette, whose power play has struggled for the last month, felt comfortable enough against a historically bad Isles PK to pull his goalie at four-on-three, and then again at five-on-four, with the Blueshirts scoring both their goals late in the third with an empty net.
Laviolette cast that decision in terms of math — even with nearly six minutes left, not scoring at four-on-three with their big guns on the ice would have put the Rangers in critical condition — but surely knowing that the Islanders haven’t scored into an empty net all year had to make him more comfortable.
“Our main objective is, in this situation, to get the kill,” Casey Cizikas said. “When we have the puck on our stick to get it down the ice and if you have the opportunity to go for it, go for it. As a killer, your first objective is to do your job out there and get the kill. You go for it when you can, you get it down the ice when it’s not there.”
A month that was supposed to be a fresh start to the season has felt a lot like the same old, and now the Islanders are four points off the nearest playoff spot.
Their 22 wins, by the way, are as many as Montreal and Ottawa, where nobody is thinking about a playoff run.
Roy spent the four days off going into Sunday holding a sort of training camp 2.0, trying to build a culture and work on fundamentals.
The Islanders are close enough to the playoffs in terms of points to try and go for it at the trade deadline.
But the new head coach feeling the need to preach fundamentals — and then the team falling right back into its old habits at the first available opportunity — says just as much as the standings about how close they really are.
Lamoriello and Roy have a hair under three weeks before the trade deadline to put their heads together and figure out where to go with this season.
But if something doesn’t change soon, the team might make the call for them.
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