EDMONTON, Alberta — Put this one on the Vezina Trophy résumé for Ilya Sorokin.
And, as a matter of fact, put it on some teach tape for defensive zone structure, too.
The Islanders didn’t have much by way of offense Thursday night in Alberta. But they escaped Edmonton with two points and a 1-0 win over an Oilers squad that had them outgunned all night thanks to the way they bore down in their own zone before finally hitting pay dirt.
“We gave it our all, we battled,” Matthew Schaefer told The Post after he and Ryan Pulock drew the matchup with Connor McDavid and helped snap No. 97’s 20-game point streak. “We gotta stop their top two lines ’cause those are where a lot of the power comes from for their team. When they’re going, everyone’s going there. So we had to make some big plays there. Sorokie played a great game.”
This was a night, and maybe the first such night since Bo Horvat was injured for the second time, when you could see just how much the Islanders are missing their leading scorer.
Horvat, who went off on New Year’s Day with a lower-body injury similar to the one that caused him to miss time in December, was originally supposed to join them for this entire trip and perhaps play by the end of it. Over halfway through, he’s still rehabbing in New York with the Islanders choosing to play it cautiously instead.
They missed him Thursday, and missed him badly.
It was a product of the Islanders’ own sturdy defense and Sorokin’s excellence in net that the game stayed scoreless for so long. The Islanders had just four shots on net in the second period and, when Leon Draisaitl was called for tripping Schaefer, they had gone the first 12 minutes of the third without one.
That is how hockey goes sometimes, though. And the last-ranked power play in the league, on a six-game scoreless streak, put together a beautiful piece of passing — Mathew Barzal to Cal Ritchie in front of the net, who backhanded it behind him to Anthony Duclair — to set up Duclair to score at 13:42 of the third and put the Islanders ahead.
“I’m just thinking what my next play is when [Barzal] has it,” Ritchie told The Post. “You can try to bait someone in and then give it to me. He did a good job doing that and then spin it, found Dukie on the tape.”
“I just knew the puck was coming,” Duclair said. “I had to put it far side. It was a great play by Ritch there.”
That, after 53 minutes straight of defense including two successful penalty kills of their own — one of which featured an Evan Bouchard shot off the crossbar that set off the goal horn inside Rogers Place before a review determined it hadn’t crossed the line.
After defending all night, a few more minutes was not much to ask and with 30 seconds to go, there was another piece of luck as Draisaitl’s one-timer hit the post.
“I see nothing,” Sorokin said of that play, having finished with a perfect 35 saves. “I just hear post sound. I think it’s a goal. It goes, the whole rink starts [getting loud]. I see the puck in the corner and say, ‘Thank God.’ ”
Offensively, this was not a night to remember.
There wasn’t a single line that held the puck in the offensive zone for a noteworthy period of time. The Islanders had no forecheck, no cycle game, not much of anything aside from defense, guile and goaltending.
Coach Patrick Roy wasted no time in switching Jonathan Drouin to the third line and Max Shabanov to the second. The line of Shabanov, Ritchie and Emil Heineman recorded just one shot attempt all night while the newly constituted third line of Drouin, Jean-Gabriel Pageau and Simon Holmstrom drew the matchup with McDavid, and therefore wasn’t asked to do much aside from defend.
The saving grace of the Islanders’ play was on their blue line. All six defensemen were excellent, keeping Edmonton to the outside and making plays with their sticks.
Behind them, Sorokin tracked every puck, stayed in command of his crease and looked entirely nonplussed under fire. Like so many other games this season, the Islanders do not have a chance in this one without their goaltender.
And like so many other games this season, that did not matter one iota at the final horn.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
