SEATTLE — Throughout a trip that everyone in the organization seemed to agree was the longest of their careers, the Islanders had done an excellent job of not letting the extended time on the road get to them.
The operative word in that sentence: had.
Because on Wednesday night in the seventh and last game of this two-week odyssey, the Islanders looked like they couldn’t wait to get on the plane and get home.
They had been playing survive-and-advance hockey most of the trip, and finally, that wasn’t enough against the Kraken in a 4-1 defeat at Climate Pledge Arena.
They finished the trip 3-3-1, a record that simultaneously feels disappointing given the Islanders beat the two best teams they played — Edmonton and Minnesota — while perhaps being more than they deserved given that they may not have decisively been the better team in any of the seven games.
“We gotta find ways to take care of the puck,” a sullen Casey Cizikas told The Post. “It’s happening too many times right now. Turn a puck over, giving them chances, odd-man chances. It’s just those turnovers are killing us, and we gotta find a way to limit those.”
Truth be told, Cizikas admitted, the problem didn’t start Wednesday.
“There’s gonna be turnovers in games, it’s inevitable, it’s gonna happen. The game’s fast, guys are on you quick,” he said. “But it’s the dumb ones.
“I think I can agree that we have gotten away with it a bit but weren’t able to come back this time or get away with it. Just frustrating.”
As for Wednesday, the high point of the game came less than three minutes in, when Anthony Duclair wired a puck in off Cal Ritchie’s feed on the power play to open the scoring.
After that, it was all Kraken.
The Islanders were beaten to too many pucks, couldn’t sustain any offense and their power play — which looked great zipping around the puck before Duclair’s goal — went ice cold.
The latter point proved particularly important as Seattle handed the Islanders seven power plays, but New York could only capitalize on the first.
They finished the night with just seven shots in 10:22 at five-on-four.
“I think we just need to move the puck faster,” coach Patrick Roy said, adding that the Islanders had passed up on too many shots. “Make quicker decisions and move it up, throw more pucks at the net.”
It was the Kraken who instead made the most of the man advantage, scoring at five-on-three on Matty Beniers’ tip at 10:40 of the first, and again just two seconds after Duclair’s tripping penalty — which had negated an Islanders power play — expired.
That goal, scored by former Ranger Kaapo Kakko on a searing wrister from the right circle to make it 3-1 at 16:28 of the second, technically wasn’t on the power play, but might as well have been.
On both that and Vince Dunn’s goal off an odd-man rush that caught Mathew Barzal’s line up ice to break a 1-1 tie in the second, Roy took issue with his team’s poor backchecking.
“We gave two goals where we should have backchecked better,” he said. “I wasn’t happy the way we backchecked on those plays.”
When Roy emptied his net with a little over four minutes to go in regulation, Jared McCann promptly obliged with an empty-netter to make it 4-1 and seal the game.
All told, the Islanders didn’t look like they had much in the tank, and Patrick Roy’s search for the right line combinations appears set to continue.
Aside from Barzal’s line, which at least generated some chances, he didn’t get much from any of his forward trios on Wednesday.
If Bo Horvat is ready to return when the Islanders are next in action on Saturday afternoon at home against Buffalo, it would do this team a world of good.
Otherwise, the Islanders will need to hope that this performance was about being at the end of the line after a long road trip, though that reasoning didn’t go far in the postgame dressing room.
“That just can’t be an excuse,” Cizikas said. “You gotta find ways to dig deep and gut these ones out. That’s what top teams in this league do. That’s what playoff teams in this league do.
“It’s a good learning experience for our team that we gotta play a full 60. We gotta have each other’s backs. But we gotta take care of the puck. We have to take care of the puck.”
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