The Islanders won’t leave home with a winless record hanging over their heads.
Four games into the season, they finally got off the schneid Thursday night by beating the Oilers 4-2 on the back of Bo Horvat’s first hat trick as an Islander, which came with Team Canada assistant general manager Julien BriseBois watching on in the press box.
In getting their first win under general manager Mathieu Darche, the Islanders became the last team in the NHL to gain points this season. Though it is always a stretch to describe a mid-October win as needed, this one came close to qualifying.
“We put all the facets of our game together,” Anders Lee told The Post. “When we do that, we tend to be on the right side of things by the end of the night. I thought it was a great response by the group.”
By far, this was the most complete 60 minutes the Islanders have put forth, with all three defense pairs contributing, the power play and penalty kill both scoring and David Rittich notching 30 saves in his Islanders debut.
The Alexander Romanov-Tony DeAngelo pair, an outright liability through three games, was excellent and so, too, was Ryan Pulock. The insertion of Kyle MacLean onto the fourth line for Max Tsyplakov worked as intended.
“They did a really great job clearing rebounds, boxing out, being tight with the guys when they needed to be,” Rittich said of the defense in front of him. “Made it way easier for me than some sort of situations with [Ilya Sorokin]. They didn’t make it easy for him.”
Even with all that, though, the match appeared to be slipping out of the Islanders’ grasp late in the second as they trailed 2-1 and the Oilers bore down on the power play. The vibe in UBS Arena changed in an instant, though, as Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s feed off the wall sprung Horvat for a short-handed break to tie the game at two.
“For him to, all in one motion, especially on his backhand [make that pass], it’s not an easy play,” Horvat said. “It was a highly skilled play by a great penalty-killer and a great player. I just had to put it in from there.”
The Islanders had struggled on their own power play all night, making a hash of their first two chances and failing to score on their third. Their fourth, which came when Matthew Schaefer drew a high stick on Trent Frederic, finally produced a breakthrough, with Barzal feeding Horvat seconds after a faceoff win.
It helped, too, that Schaefer — whose minutes were far lower Thursday than the 26-plus he’d played in the previous two games — was promoted to the top power-play for the last two Isles chances.
“I think we all know,” coach Patrick Roy said, “it’s just a matter of time before he’s playing on that [top] power play on a regular basis.”
That made for a nervy last few minutes with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl on the ice together, but Rittich stood tall to hang onto the lead before Horvat completed the hat trick with an empty-net goal.
“I was happy to see Bo scoring,” Roy said. “He was playing really well. Sometimes, just a matter of time. I’m always saying this: ‘It’s a matter of time, matter of time,’ but it’s nice that it happened.
“When [Skinner] made the save in the second period [stopping Horvat on a breakaway], I said, ‘Oh, come on, not tonight. But he scored on [the next] breakaway and then the next two.”
Indeed, the Islanders avoided the ignominy of an 0-4-0 start that would have qualified for the franchise’s longest-ever losing streak to start a season. They can march on to Ottawa without feeling snakebit, with their first three games behind them.
Now, it is time to jump properly into the fray.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
