It’s been a long time since the Islanders played a period as good as the middle 20 minutes on Saturday.
It’s been a long time since the Islanders had a win as good as the 4-3 victory over the Hurricanes they earned at UBS Arena.
“We knew we had to bounce back, we weren’t good enough the other night [a 5-2 loss to the Kraken],” Ryan Pulock said after the Islanders became the final team in the Eastern Conference to reach double-digit victories, yet somehow climbed — at least for the moment — within one point of a playoff spot. “It was probably our worst game of the year. So we knew we had to bounce back and I think every guy in here came to work today and did a really good job.”
The pattern of the last few weeks has been that the Islanders have won on Saturdays and lost on every other day of the week, so the jury is out on whether or not this represents a real step forward.
Nevertheless, after a disastrous showing Thursday that carried over into the first period against the ’Canes, the Islanders were bordering on crisis mode if they could not pull themselves together — and that is just what they did in a four-goal outburst in the second.
It was, in particular, the Islanders’ response to Andrei Svechnikov’s second power-play goal of the night — which gave Carolina a 2-1 lead after Anders Lee was mistakenly called for a high stick on Martin Necas — that the team can hang its hat on.
Oliver Wahlstrom re-tied the score just 47 seconds after Svechnikov’s goal, beating Pyotr Kochetkov after Casey Cizikas won the puck back off the forecheck.
From there, the last 10 minutes of the period was all Islanders.
They owned the puck. They won battles. They generated pressure around the net and in the high-danger areas.
It was everything they had not done Thursday, or for that matter in a lackadaisical opening period against Carolina on Saturday.
It resulted in goals from Max Tsyplakov, who batted in his own rebound, and from Bo Horvat, who finished off J-G Pageau’s feed on the rush to break a 13-game scoreless drought that had been weighing heavily on his psyche.
“I think we got some chances and we took those opportunities and capitalized on them,” Pageau told The Post after a three-point night that included a goal off the rush that opened the Islanders’ account. “That’s how it was. I think we stuck to our game the whole game, winning our battles on the wall that would create some opportunities. When we did have those, I think we scored most of them tonight.”
Despite that, there was still the not-so-small matter of holding the lead, and the less said about the Islanders’ recent record of doing that, the better.
The Hurricanes did indeed come with a push in the third and it was in no small measure down to Ilya Sorokin, who was pulled from Thursday’s match, to keep the lead intact.
That the goalie did, finishing with 28 saves as the ’Canes put together a 19-2 barrage over the last 20 minutes. This was not going to turn into a rerun of every other blown lead.
This was not going to turn into a rerun of multiple playoff games against the Hurricanes over the last two years.
“When we made a few mistakes in that third period, Ilya was outstanding,” coach Patrick Roy said. “He’s one of the best in the game and he showed why. He makes those big saves for us, kept it at a two-goal game.”
The Hurricanes did give the Islanders a scare at six-on-five, cutting the lead to one with a Jesperi Kotkaniemi goal in the final minute, but it proved too little, too late.
On a night when Islanders special teams were bad — Carolina scored twice on the power play while the Isles struggled to enter the zone on either of their power plays — and where the run of play in the third period was heavily tilted against them, you could view this as a mirage.
The Islanders would like to view it as a second straight third-period lead successfully held and as a four-point win over a divisional foe — the sort that can become a building block.
Time will tell.
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