The Islanders finally got the all-around performance they’ve been looking for and the result was their best game of the season.
A 60-minute effort buoyed by a lockdown defensive game led to the Islanders closing out their homestand with a 7-2 rout of the Red Wings on Thursday night, their fourth straight victory.
Until now, the wins had felt a little bit hollow.
The Islanders, though happy to be getting results, were far too open defensively, ranking last in the league in expected goals allowed and allowing games to turn into track meets. They knew they would need to tighten things up in their own zone to create anything sustainable, and the firing of goalie coach Piero Greco on Wednesday was a blaring signal that management was not happy with the state of things either.
It’s still unknown whether replacing Greco with Sergei Naumovs will help Ilya Sorokin push past his rocky start — David Rittich started Thursday, turning aside 29 shots — but this was the Islanders’ best defensive performance of the season by a significant margin.
There were no breakdowns in structure or communication. The Islanders won battles. They cleared out the front of their net and kept Rittich’s sightlines clean. They forced turnovers more than they turned pucks over themselves.
Hollow, it was not.
And the Red Wings, who walked in looking to get right after a woeful performance in Buffalo on Wednesday, flew back to Detroit in a stupor.
Tony DeAngelo, one of the Islanders who has struggled most this season, got the scoring started just 2:55 into the game, taking Anders Lee’s pass from the right wall and burying it.
Emil Heineman made it 2-0 at the 14:56 mark of the first with his fourth goal of the year from Bo Horvat’s two-on-one feed.
The Islanders held Detroit to just five shots in the opening 20 minutes, and only got better from there.
Jean-Gabriel Pageau scored the Islanders’ third goal, scoring from the slot when Lee found him after the Isles forced a turnover in the neutral zone at 7:25 of the second. The blowout was on six minutes later when Ryan Pulock threw a puck at the Detroit net that deflected off Kyle Palmieri’s skate and in.
For good measure, Mathew Barzal made it 5-0 before the second period ended, roofing the puck after coming out of a scrum with an unimpeded path to the net. After Dylan Larkin broke the shutout in the third, Heineman and Simon Holmstrom added two more Islanders goals, the latter coming on Lee’s third assist of the night.
More important than the offensive explosion, however, was that the Islanders gave up nothing defensively. Not until the third period, when there was no reason to do anything aside from sit back with the Islanders leading by five goals, was Rittich seriously tested, and the backup goalie turned in a second consecutive strong performance.
Matthew Schaefer went point-less for the first time in his NHL career, and thus fell one game short of Alexandre Daigle’s record points streak for an 18-year-old in the expansion era. Given that it came on a night when 12 other Islanders recorded at least one point, everyone involved was OK with the tradeoff.
At 4-3-0, the Islanders are not only over NHL-.500 for the first time this season, but have won more games than they’ve lost for the first time since Nov. 2, 2023, when their record was 5-2-2.
It’s fair to say there is considerably more optimism now than there was then.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
