LAS VEGAS — The Islanders are used to losing in gut-punch fashion, but not like this.
This was not a blown lead or an overtime loss. This was a game in which the Islanders were hanging with the Stanley Cup champs blow for blow for much of the night. But it was the Golden Knights who delivered the knockout in what became a 5-2 loss for the Islanders, who could not capitalize on enough chances.
“We were good,” coach Lane Lambert said. “And [made] a couple of mistakes. And it turned fast. I thought, but for about two-and-a-half, three minutes, it was maybe our most solid game of the trip.”
The Islanders played about as well as they could have reasonably asked for over the game’s first 37 minutes and that is what made this one tough to take.
They competed for every puck. They forechecked hard and often. They skated with intent, controlling the run of play in one of the toughest buildings in the league to play on the road.
And yet the Islanders still entered the third period facing a 3-1 deficit, having failed to convert scoring opportunities and having seen Vegas take advantage of their own leaky defensive structure.
Pavel Dorofeyev broke a 1-1 deadlock with a backdoor tap-in off Chandler Stephenson’s feed at the 17:11 mark of the second.
Just 90 seconds later, Nicolas Roy made it 3-1 on a left-circle wrist shot that Ilya Sorokin couldn’t see through the screen of Keegan Kolesar — a play the Islanders challenged for goaltender interference and lost.
“We saw his foot in the blue paint and we saw Ilya’s mask up against his body,” Lambert said. “It was the right call for us to challenge that.”
Just a few minutes earlier, Anders Lee had hit the post on a two-on-one chance. And a few minutes before that, Kyle Palmieri was stoned by Logan Thompson after getting in alone from Samuel Bolduc’s stretch pass.
Needing a comeback in the third, the Islanders instead folded like they were playing poker a few blocks away.
Jack Eichel scored his second goal of the night from the power play just 31 seconds into the period to make it 4-1, taking advantage after the bench minor from the doomed challenge carried over.
That was a quick and easy dagger into the Isles’ chances of turning this game into two points.
The Isles did fight back, with Matt Martin diving on Casey Cizikas’ rebound to make it 4-2 just a couple minutes after Eichel scored.
But Roy’s wrist shot from below the left circle following Mat Barzal’s turnover trickled through Sorokin to put the lead right back at three before the period was five minutes old.
That was where it would stay.
Thompson, who finished with 28 saves, was brilliant all night, outplaying Sorokin in a game where the Islanders probably had the better of the chances.
“D-zone, turnovers are probably costing us,” Barzal said. “Mine tonight. The first goal of theirs kind of came off that. That’s what it comes down to. You got to get pucks out. Obviously didn’t get that one out, it ended up costing us.”
Jack Eichel opened the scoring 6:25 into the game as he took advantage of a defensive breakdown to let loose a free one-timer from the slot.
But Mat Barzal sent the Islanders into the first intermission tied after he banked the puck off Thompson and in from a sharp angle at 11:13, with a review confirming the goal a couple minutes after the fact.
On a night where Thompson had the Islanders’ number, that was as good as the scoreboard ever looked.
It also leaves a bad taste in the Islanders’ mouths as they fly back home with a 1-2-1 record over the four-game trip that started in Pittsburgh and ended in the desert.
Outside of an overtime loss in Colorado, the Isles did not play terribly but left points on the table and fell to a tie for third with the Flyers in the Metropolitan Division.
They can justifiably say that chances were there and they played their game. But throw in Semyon Varlamov getting hurt in Denver and this trip made for a lousy start to the new year.
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