Patrick Roy watched “Rocky” the other day and saw a pretty apt parallel with his injury-riddled team.
“At the fight, Rocky was going, bouncing up and down, and Apollo [Creed] looked at him like, ‘What are you doing? Go down.’ And Rocky refuses to go down,” Roy said. “You’re gonna say to me, yeah, it’s a movie. But I think we love people that refuse to go down.
“We love people that want to battle for their dream. People that’s gonna fight. So that’s what we’re gonna have to do.”
Excuse Roy the cheesy analogy and the sort of inconvenient piece that Rocky loses the fight.
With Mat Barzal out for what could be the long haul — the Islanders placed him on injured reserve Tuesday, and Roy couldn’t answer whether the team will have him back this season — the only thing left for the Islanders to do is keep fighting a battle that few think they can win.
At least right now, that seems to be working, with the Islanders entering Tuesday’s match against Vegas as winners in 10 of their past 13, having climbed their way back into the wild-card race even as their defense corps has been completely remade due to injuries.
“I think for us there’s enough people outside this room that are doing those doubts for us,” Kyle Palmieri told The Post. “I think for us, it’s really an unwavering belief. We’ve clawed our way into the playoffs the last two years. Obviously didn’t accomplish our ultimate goal. We know we can climb this hill.”
Big picture: The Islanders’ situation is still far from enviable.
There are still questions swirling about whether they’ll move Palmieri and Brock Nelson at the trade deadline, still worries about the viability of keeping the group together.
And even if they do make the playoffs, you can rest assured the Islanders will be prohibitive underdogs in the first round, let alone to win the Cup.
But that’s a problem for Lou Lamoriello and ownership.
Inside the dressing room, at least for the moment, there’s something good going on.
The Islanders are rallying around the flag and getting some results out of it, at a moment when it would be very easy for the season to fall apart.
Barzal going down makes everything tougher. But the Islanders are already without the entire right side of their defense and two of their top three goalies. And they’ve already gone a long stretch of this season without Barzal.
The Islanders made the playoffs two years ago after Barzal got hurt. Who says they won’t do it again?
This is a tougher lift than the past two seasons, not just because of the injuries, but because the Islanders put themselves in a greater hole over the first 10 weeks of the year.
But somehow, it’s not impossible, even with an injury situation that has long since crossed over into ridiculousness.
“What’s happened over the past few weeks, all the injuries that have mounted up, I’ve never been a part of something like this where it happened consecutively, one game after another,” Casey Cizikas told The Post. “But the mindset is, we go out there, we compete like we have been. It’s definitely tough losing someone like Barzy, he’s a guy that’s irreplaceable. But we need guys to step up and keep playing the way we were playing as a group.”
Including Tuesday, there’s three games between now and the two-week break for the 4 Nations Face-Off.
If the Islanders can get through that, it’ll at least give them a shot to take a breather and perhaps get a couple guys back for the home stretch.
Nobody believes in the Islanders. But that’s nothing new.
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