The last time a losing side was so grateful to be defeated, it was at Bunker Hill.
If not for the worst embarrassment the Islanders have suffered in recent memory, Matthew Schaefer would have made his Battle of New York debut on Saturday.
Only it would have come for the Rangers, not the Islanders.
The Islanders have allowed nine or more goals in a game 20 times in their history, and April 10 was their first time doing so in almost exactly 16 years.
When all is said and done, it’s possible that no franchise in history will ever be so grateful to get embarrassed by their rivals on home ice.
At the time, of course, losing 9-2 to the Rangers did not feel that way.
The Islanders were not tanking, had no interest in tanking and were appropriately upset by the entire thing.
With both teams clinging by a thread to playoff hopes, the loss set the table for the Islanders to be officially eliminated two days later in Philadelphia and marked an embarrassing low.
With Ilya Sorokin out due to injury, backup goaltender Marcus Hogberg was pulled then amazingly put back in the game after Tristan Lennox let in a goal on the second shot he saw.
The moment was just embarrassing for Patrick Roy as it was for Lennox, who was making his NHL debut.
Rangers fans took over the UBS Arena stands as their team swept the Islanders in the season series for the first time since 2003-04.
Veterans such as Anders Lee, Adam Pelech and Ryan Pulock played one of the worst games of their respective careers.
“We played a horses–t game,” Lee said afterward, summing the night up artfully.
When both the Islanders and Rangers wrapped their seasons just over a week later, the Rangers finished three points ahead of the Isles in the standings, 85 points to 82.
Had the Islanders spared themselves some humiliation and won that game, they would have finished with 84 points to the Rangers’ 83.
The difference, of course, seemed utterly meaningless at the time.
The Islanders entered the draft lottery with odds of 3.5 percent as opposed to the Rangers’ 3.0 percent. Big whoop.
No, really: Big whoop.
Those two points the Islanders did not get, and that extra half-percent in the draft lottery odds that they had instead, might swing the Battle of New York for the next generation.
The lottery-ball combination that netted Schaefer — 7-11-12-13 — would have otherwise belonged to the Rangers.
And instead of dealing with a lack of lefty defenseman that’s seen them call up Matthew Robertson to play on their third pair, the Rangers would have the current Calder Trophy favorite.
(The Rangers had the choice of sending their 2025 or ’26 first-round pick to Vancouver for J.T. Miller, but it’s a safe bet that team president Chris Drury would have opted about three seconds after the lottery balls came up to keep this year’s selection.)
Instead of walking into his first general manager job with the No. 1 overall pick in hand, Mathieu Darche would have had to do his best with No. 12 overall, where the Flyers took Jack Nesbitt with the pick that had originally belonged to the Rangers before bouncing from Vancouver to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.
The optimism that surrounds the Islanders right now, even amid a middling 6-6-2 start, would be turned down by about 50 degrees.
The connections that Schaefer already has built with the fan base on Long Island instead would have been on Broadway.
The Islanders won that round of the Battle of New York, and the ramifications could last until 2045.
They won it by losing.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
