The Islanders’ experimentation with Adam Boqvist at forward isn’t over quite yet.
The defenseman got another shot playing up front on Monday with Hudson Fasching out with illness, taking Fasching’s spot on the right side of the third line.
Boqvist centered the fourth line for a game a couple weeks ago in Anaheim when Kyle MacLean was ill.
Not only that, but Boqvist put up a pair of assists as the Islanders lost 4-3 to the Blue Jackets in a shootout.
“First of all it was funny because he wanted to see some clips,” coach Patrick Roy said pregame. “So I love that the players care. They want to do well, doesn’t matter [where]. I think you’re going in a stretch, whatever you can do to help the team.
“I think any defenseman, we ask them to play forward, they would all say yes. I think these guys all just want to try and make the playoffs. That’s all they want.”
With Matt Martin being the only extra forward, it appears the coaching staff would prefer to play Boqvist out of position, since he can also contribute on the power play.
“I thought he did well,” Roy said afterward. “It’s not easy for a guy — 10-minute practice, that’s all he had. I guess he did really well.”
Monday was Boqvist’s first game in the lineup since he suffered a shoulder injury on March 11.
He and Alexander Romanov also came down sick in between, and though it’s not clear MacLean, Boqvist, Romanov and Fasching all caught the same illness, the Islanders have been dealing with an unusual amount of sickness lately.
Roy used an unrelated question on Monday to make a point about the Islanders penalty kill, saying it upsets him to see people overlook the unit’s dramatic improvement since the new year.
“It bothers me when people are saying our PK sucks. Our PK doesn’t suck,” he said. “Since January 1, we’re like eighth in the league in penalty killing at 81 percent. Eighty-one percent is pretty good.”
“So yeah, we had a tough start on PK, I’ll admit that, but since January 1, our PK is top-1 in the NHL so we gotta stop saying, ‘When you look at [season-long] statistics, the Islanders are at the bottom of the league’ — no. We’re not at the bottom of the league. We’re in the top of the league the way we’ve been killing penalties.”
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