The Islanders wanted to start strong.
They wanted to take a lead and play with a lead.
They wanted to stop digging themselves a hole in the first period, something they’d done in seven of their first eight games following the Olympic break.
Check, check and check on Saturday night, when a 3-0 first period powered a 3-2 win over the Flames at UBS Arena.
It remains to be seen if they can keep it up Tuesday night in Toronto, but here was proof positive that the Islanders can do plenty in the first period.
“We had a really good first period,” coach Patrick Roy said. “We had good jump. … Was pretty pleased with the way we came out. Part of what we talked [about] before the game, we want to have a good start, and we had the good start we were looking for.”
The playing with a lead bit, admittedly, may need some work, as the Islanders let Calgary back into the game in a third that got way too close for comfort.
Dustin Wolf, who relieved Devin Cooley after the latter coughed up a three-goal first, was simply excellent for Calgary, giving the Flames a chance to come back.
The warning signs started to blare 2:17 into the third, when Mikael Backlund tipped in Olli Maatta’s shot to make it 3-1.
Wolf pulled out a showstopper on Cal Ritchie shortly thereafter — his second terrific save off a rebound after robbing Matthew Schaefer late in the second — to keep it that way.
Then at the 8:28 mark, Blake Coleman took advantage of a poorly timed change to cut the lead to 3-2.
The Flames didn’t let up from there.
The Islanders successfully defended their lead in the end, but it would be hard to claim they played a good 60 minutes.
It took everything, right down to David Rittich’s 30th and final save of the night on Zayne Parekh with 17 seconds to go, to keep the Islanders from being on the wrong end of the comeback effort.
“It’s a combination of everything,” Brayden Schenn told The Post. “We’re on a back-to-back, they’re fresh, they’re coming at us. That side of it. But I think we can manage the puck a little bit better. Put pucks to the goal line. Wear them down. Don’t let them keep on coming at us in waves. So that’s something we have to clean up.”
With that caveat, Saturday had plenty of good, starting with proof that Simon Holmstrom does not need Jean-Gabriel Pageau centering him to impact the game at a high level.
Coach Patrick Roy finally broke up the duo that had played all but two games together since Jan. 6, usually on the third line with Anders Lee, to put Holmstrom on the right side of Schenn on Saturday, with Anthony Duclair back in to complete the second line.
That allowed Ritchie to go to the third line with Lee and Pageau, while Ondrej Palat played on the fourth line, where he finished Friday’s loss to the Kings, with Casey Cizikas and Kyle MacLean.
The almost innate chemistry Holmstrom has with Pageau has always been the implicit argument against this sort of move.
Schenn, though, is not too dissimilar of a player to Pageau, and found himself in the sort of spot Pageau often is at 16:35 of the first: feeding Holmstrom on the rush for a goal that made it 2-0 Islanders.
Holmstrom got on the board again just a few minutes later, this one shorthanded and — as per usual — from Pageau after the latter had started the rush when Yegor Sharangovich fumbled a puck.
“It certainly gives us four very good lines, having [Holmstrom] playing with Schenn,” Roy said. “I thought that was giving us scoring from that line, A, and then, B, feeling comfortable that they could defend very well. And that’s what they did.”
The pair of late goals belied a first period in which the Islanders had played excellent hockey, and in which the aforementioned lineup changes paid dividends.
Cizikas jammed one in at the front of the net to open the scoring 10:06 in, and all four lines — including the Emil Heineman, Bo Horvat, Mathew Barzal trio that had accounted for both goals Friday night and was unchanged from the second half of that game — had it rolling.
“Casey’s line, they really got us going,” Holmstrom said, echoing the sentiment around the room.
The win ensured the Islanders would end the night no worse than third in the Metropolitan Division, though the exact placement depended on the Penguins’ result against Utah in Salt Lake City.
Scoreboard watching, of course, is much less stressful when the Islanders take care of business adequately.
It was thanks to their start that they did just that.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
