Is this going to matter?
That’s the big question right now for the Islanders, who are doubling down on this season on twin tracks — finding their game on ice while the front office continues to send signals that it is not going to lie down, play dead and sell off parts.
This was the message on a Friday night when the Islanders won a third straight game to make it six of eight, beating the Flyers, 3-1, at UBS Arena mere hours after the team brought in Tony DeAngelo as its Noah Dobson replacement, Dobson having suffered what looked like a serious right-leg injury Monday night.
Depending where you sit, the move read somewhere between desperation and pragmatism, but what it said loud and clear was that Lou Lamoriello’s position has not changed from earlier this month — he’s not yet thinking about selling.
The Islanders, at 20-20-7, are back at NHL .500 for the first time since Dec. 12, with a chance to get over the mark for the first time since Nov. 14 when they face the Hurricanes on Saturday.
For the first time all season, they are playing like a team with an identity, sustaining their level from game to game and working through adversity on the fly.
There is real momentum here.
Players and management are aligned in wanting to defy the narrative.
“I think we’re playing to our identity,” Bo Horvat said. “I think we’re playing to our strengths. And that’s simple: We’re forechecking well, we’re playing well structurally defensively, we’re doing a lot of little things like that, which is helping us, for sure.”
The rub is in the standings.
Even after winning a four-point game against the Flyers on Friday, the Islanders still sat 15th in the Eastern Conference, needing to pass seven teams and make up six points on the Blue Jackets — who hold the last wild-card spot — to be above the cutline.
For now, this still is a low-stakes game, with the pot inching higher and higher until the March 7 trade deadline.
Aside from risking injury to a tradable asset or a DeAngelo-induced public relations fallout, there is not much to be lost by letting things play out for a couple of more weeks.
At least on Friday, the Islanders did not look like a team that was going to let the season go easily.
In a low-event match in which the tone was set early after Alexander Romanov ran over Cam York in the defensive zone, the Islanders were the team setting terms and the team in control.
“He plays physical all the time. That’s his game,” Ryan Pulock said after No. 28 finished with six hits, five blocked shots and an assist over 23:22 of ice. “When there’s a body to be played, he plays it. So I think, obviously, it set the tone tonight. Just a great game from him.”
There was a lot of bumping and not much free ice in this affair, which in classic fashion featured the Flyers instigating scrums at every opportunity after both coaches said pregame there would be no carryover from last Thursday’s match, when Max Tsyplakov injured Ryan Poehling.
The Islanders, after going down 1-0 on Tyson Foerster’s opener, started clicking — seemingly realizing that for all the physicality in this one, there would be rush chances on offer.
Across the first and second periods, the Isles proceeded to score the next three goals, with Anthony Duclair and Bo Horvat doing so 55 seconds apart late in the first before Brock Nelson added one at 13:56 of the third — all on quick breakouts leading to odd-man rushes.
Meanwhile, the defense — in its first game minus Dobson — clamped down, with coach Patrick Roy rotating his pairs to help shelter Isaiah George and Dennis Cholowski in compensation for Dobson’s absence.
“I thought they were outstanding,” Roy said. “Gave up more shots in the third, but it’s normal. They had, what, 14 after two periods?”
And while the Islanders have been anything but perfect over the past two months, one thing they do have a 100 percent success rate at since the start of December is closing out games with a third-period lead.
That still leaves the question: Is any of this going to matter?
Only if the Islanders — who will be joined by DeAngelo on Saturday if the defenseman clears waivers, a necessary step because he is coming from SKA St. Petersburg in the KHL — can make it matter.
They’ve made a step toward doing so.
But there’s a long, long way to go.
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