Just 10 days ago, the Islanders were riding a wave of momentum, the ceiling on their season looking higher than anyone had realized.
Since then it has gone down, down, down, with things seemingly getting worse by the day.
By the end of Sunday afternoon, they had a fourth loss in five games, 4-1 to the Capitals in a game that all but confirmed that, yes, this is going to be much harder without Kyle Palmieri in the fold after the winger tore his ACL.
It’s not that the Islanders weren’t competitive; it was quite the opposite in a game where they nearly doubled Washington’s shot count and Caps netminder Logan Thompson was the best player on either side.
“We did everything right,” coach Patrick Roy said. “We had a lot of shots, we had a lot of chances, we came up short. We could find excuses — I get it, the standard of our team is to win hockey games and do the right thing. Sometimes you need to just continue to play the way we are and believe that things will go on our way.”
If he wasn’t right in the literal sense, he was certainly right in spirit.
The Islanders weren’t perfect but they outshot Washington 31-18 and won the high-danger chances 14-11.
“The amount of two-on-ones we had tonight, the grade-A looks we had, we’re doing everything right, I feel like,” Cal Ritchie said. “Not [finding] the back of the net. We gotta bear down on our chances.”
Bo Horvat’s power-play goal with 6:17 remaining cut a 2-0 lead to 2-1, but ended up being the last gasp of momentum for the Islanders.
Despite having 2:38 with the goalie pulled, they didn’t look like much of a threat to tie the game at six-on-five before Aliaksei Protas scored into an empty net seconds after beating out an icing call.
Alex Ovechkin scored another empty-netter to make it 4-1.
Prior to that, the Islanders made a couple of crucial errors when the situation — both their roster and Thompson’s level of play — required a near perfect game.
Ilya Sorokin, in an incredibly rare occurrence, turned over a puck from behind the net and could not get back into position before Tom Wilson made it a 2-0 game at 13:58 of the second.
“It was a bad decision,” Sorokin told The Post. “Wanted to [put] the puck high. It was a broken play. It happens. Bad decision.”
A few minutes later, Horvat’s feed to spring Mat Barzal on a 1-on-0 breakaway was just a tad too far ahead of No. 13, though it’s worth noting that Thompson was imperious on rush chances all afternoon.
If there’s a trend worth noting, it’s that the Islanders continued to struggle getting bodies around both creases. Tom Wilson was left alone at the left post to tap in Ovechkin’s feed on the power play for Washington’s opening goal.
The Islanders were rarely in the blue paint in front of Thompson in the same way, and that is not an isolated occurrence.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
