DALLAS — If not for what looked like a serious injury to Alexander Romanov in the final minute of Tuesday’s game, you would be calling this the best road trip the Islanders have had in a hot minute.
Their fifth win in six on the road, which snapped a five-game Stars winning streak on Tuesday night by a 3-2 score that came in gritty, grinding fashion, confirmed as much. The Islanders have now won games in all four time zones on this trip, which finally ends in Detroit on Thursday, and not one of them was easy.
Tuesday, a night when it looked — at least for a while — like the Islanders may not have enough moxie in their game to get out of Dallas with two points, may have been the toughest.
There was too much east/west in their game, too few pucks put deep. The Islanders have become a team heavily dependent on skill and speed on the rush — a needed correction from the past few years that, on certain nights, looks like an overcorrection. Tuesday was one of those.
Until it was not.
Give the Islanders all the credit there is for their ability to recognize a problem and work in real time to fix it. They were dominated in the first period and got next to nothing going for the first chunk of the second, depending largely on backup netminder David Rittich to keep them in it.
You could see in Cal Ritchie’s opening goal — No. 64’s first as an Islander, a one-timer from the low slot off Anthony Duclair’s feed — the Islanders beginning to work through their issues.
So too in their response to Jason Robertson’s 1-1 goal, which came on a three-on-one rush that followed a Tony DeAngelo turnover a few minutes later.
By the third period, when the game’s decisive notes were played, they were in the dogfight fully — and there would have been no winning this otherwise.
Just 3:12 into the final period, Bo Horvat got the greasy goal the Islanders needed, cleaning up the garbage on Kyle Palmieri’s rebound.
Horvat appeared to give the Stars a window back into the game when he caught Oskar Back with a high stick a few minutes later, and earned a 10-minute misconduct along with the double minor penalty. But instead it was the Stars who imploded.
Palmieri made it 3-1 on a short-handed rush on what was the Islanders’ league-leading fifth short-handed goal of the season. Jamie Benn wiped out two of the four minutes with a high stick of his own, and the Islanders dutifully killed off the rest of the penalty.
For good measure, the Stars negated another chance at five-on-four a few minutes later, with Jason Robertson getting called for hooking after Matthew Schaefer caught Robertson with a high stick.
The Stars did give the Islanders a scare anyway, pulling within 3-2 with 1:59 left in regulation on a Robertson goal. By the final buzzer, though, the greater concern was Romanov, who was smashed into the boards by Mikko Rantanen with 27.3 seconds to go.
Romanov was helped off the ice in what looked like considerable pain, and Rantanen was thrown out of the game. It looked like Patrick Roy exchanged words with the Finn as he went down the tunnel.
To make matters worse, the Stars appeared to have tied it at the buzzer on a Wyatt Johnston goal, but it was wiped off for goaltender interference — a rule that has often earned Patrick Roy’s ire ironically saving his team’s bacon.
So on to Detroit the Islanders go, as a team that ought to be commanding attention.
It’s 20 games into the season now, essentially a quarter of the way through, and after a three-game losing streak to begin the season, the Islanders are 11-4-2.
They have the hottest rookie in the league.
They are nearly all the way through one of the toughest road trips the league could have given them — yet somehow the second-toughest trip of the season given that a 17-day trek awaits in January — and have answered the call.
Maybe everyone underestimated this team.
That is, certainly, what the evidence shows right now.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
