SEATTLE — Throughout a trip that everyone in the organization seemed to agree was the longest of their careers, the Islanders had done an excellent job of not letting the extended time on the road get to them.
The operative word in that sentence: had.
Because on Wednesday night in the seventh and last game of this two-week odyssey, the Islanders looked like they couldn’t wait to get on the plane and get home.
They’d been playing survive-and-advance hockey most of the trip, and finally, that wasn’t enough against the Kraken in a 4-1 defeat at Climate Pledge Arena.
That means they’ll finish the trip 3-3-1, a record that will simultaneously feel disappointing given the Islanders beat the two best teams they played — Edmonton and Minnesota — while perhaps being more than they deserved given that they may not have decisively been the better team in any of the seven games.
As for Wednesday, the high point of the game came less than three minutes in, when Anthony Duclair wired a puck in off Cal Ritchie’s feed on the power play to open the scoring. After that, it was all Kraken.
The Islanders were beaten to too many pucks, couldn’t sustain any offense and their power play — which had looked great zipping around the puck before Duclair’s goal — went ice cold.
The latter point proved particularly important as every door the Kraken opened for them came via that route. Seattle handed the Islanders seven power plays, but New York could only capitalize on the first. They finished the night with just seven shots in 10:22 at 5-on-4.
It was the Kraken who instead capitalized on the man advantage, scoring at 5-on-3 on Matty Beniers’ tip at 10:40 of the first, and again just two seconds after Duclair’s tripping penalty — which had negated an Islanders power play — expired. That goal, scored by Kaapo Kakko on a searing wrister from the right circle to make it 3-1 at 16:28 of the second, technically wasn’t on the man advantage, but it might as well have been.
When Roy emptied his net with a little over four minutes to go in regulation, Jared McCann promptly obliged with an empty-netter to make it 4-1 and seal the game.
All told, the Islanders didn’t look like they had much in the tank, and Patrick Roy’s search for the right line combinations appears set to continue.
Duclair’s line with Mathew Barzal and Anders Lee was the most consistent as far as generating offense, but was caught out on an odd-man rush leading to Vince Dunn’s goal that broke a 1-1 tie at 13:37 of the second.
The revamped second and fourth lines, meanwhile, didn’t amount to much, though Max Shabanov accounted for a few chances in his return to the lineup. Maxim Tsyplakov was fine, if unconvincing, and the Kyle MacLean, Ritchie and Emil Heineman trio understandably looked at points like they hadn’t played together.
By the third, Roy was mixing and matching the forwards in an admission of the obvious: that the Islanders still haven’t found something that works.
If Bo Horvat is ready to return when the Islanders are next in action on Saturday afternoon at home against Buffalo, it would do this team a world of good.
Otherwise, the Islanders will need to hope that this performance was about being at the end of the line after a long road trip, and not foreshadowing something worse.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
