If Thursday was a “prove it” game for the Islanders, then the only thing they proved was that they are not close, not at all, to where they need to be if they hope to squeeze anything out of this season.
The Islanders entered the night with their lineup closer to fully healthy (Ryan Pulock is the only regular still on injured reserve) and with four wins in their last five games, but then fell back to .500 — and flat on their faces — after a 3-2 loss to the Kings that might dispel any lingering notion that there’s a run in them.
No longer is it early in the season. No longer are the Islanders missing half their lineup due to COVID-19. No longer do they have an outsize number of home games left. Yet still they look like a thoroughly mediocre hockey team.
“[The Kings] were sitting back, making it tough to get through the neutral zone,” Casey Cizikas said. “I thought they were really good at breaking out the puck and making those small area plays when we got in there.”
A postseason berth might not be in the cards even if they were playing at a red-hot pace, but there certainly won’t be a spot in the playoffs if this is how the Islanders play every time a team with pedigree comes to UBS Arena.
Just as against the Maple Leafs on Saturday, the Islanders gave up a needless goal at the end of a period. Just as against the Capitals two weeks ago, they struggled to find much offense — Mathew Barzal spent much of this game skating around the Kings’ zone waiting for something to open up. Just as in both of those games, the Islanders lost.
It looked as if a window had opened up for them to get back in the game when a tripping call on Blake Lizotte wiped out a second Kings goal at 14:39 of the second period. But the Islanders failed to get anything on the subsequent power play, and as time wound down in the period, the Kings’ Andreas Athanasiou beat Semyon Varlamov with a wrist shot from an acute angle along the left boards, lifting the puck past the goalie’s glove to double Los Angeles’ lead to 2-0 with 5.1 seconds to go until intermission.
“I’m sure Varly would like to have one back tonight at the end of the period,” Islanders coach Barry Trotz said. “Those are a bit deflating. You’re down one puck, now you’re down two pucks with a few seconds to go.”
That resulted in the Islanders being booed off the ice going into the second intermission. In the third period, at least it couldn’t be said the Islanders lacked chances. In the first 10 minutes alone, Kings goalie Cal Petersen denied Jean-Gabriel Pageau from the slot and Cal Clutterbuck off a centering feed on the doorstep. Both were grade-A looks.
Barzal finally got one to go in with 2:04 left, converting a wrist shot that made the final score look closer. But that was too little, too late.
An empty-netter from Adrian Kempe with 35.5 seconds to go seemed to seal the win for the Kings, but Cizikas scored with 19.3 seconds left to add some drama to the affair. Still, the Islanders came up short.
The last 40 minutes were better for the Islanders than the first 20, in which the Kings dominated, holding a 9-3 margin in shots on goal. Quinton Byfield scored his first career goal on a wrist shot past Varlamov at 17:05 of the period.
Varlamov’s 27 saves looked good, but there were two goals he would have liked to get back.
Afterwards, the Islanders lamented hitting iron twice — first on a shot by Adam Pelech during a two-on-one early in the game that found the crossbar and later by Robin Salo during Lizotte’s penalty — but on the whole, the offense wasn’t there.
“I think tonight it’s a matter of getting pucks to the net, getting traffic there, making it difficult,” Cizikas said. “That’s kinda the way you have to play against that kinda style, that kinda team.”
The final score was as much a reflection of the Islanders’ struggles to generate scoring as of anything else. They finished the night with 30 shots on target. But finishing has been their bugaboo all season, and it was again on Thursday.
Thirty-six games into the season, the Islanders are 15-15-6, their mediocrity reflected in their failure to beat a playoff team. There’s still time to get back in it, but less and less of it each day.