It is never good to lose games that circumstance begs you to win, and circumstance was begging the Islanders on Saturday night.
Washington came into UBS Arena on the second night of a back-to-back with one of its best defensemen, Martin Fehervary, out injured and another, Rasmus Sandin, playing while banged up.
Hunter Shepard, who started for the Capitals in net, was making just his second start in the NHL and first in two weeks.
There is no better circumstance to snap a three-game losing skid than that.
But the Islanders are a team whose problems right now always seem to outweigh that of their opposition.
They managed to make it four losses in a row and five of six, hitting a nadir as their record hit .500 after a 4-1 loss to the Capitals.
To make things even worse, just one home game after fans chanted “Lou must go,” they chanted “Fire Lambert,” repeatedly during the third period — head coach Lane Lambert bearing the ire of fans on this night instead of general manager Lou Lamoriello.
The chanting fans finally cleared out after Alex Ovechkin’s empty-netter with 3 seconds to go provided the final margin.
But what will make this one especially sting is that it was not an example of the Islanders getting outplayed or failing to execute the basic tenets of their game.
Unlike other losses during this run, the Islanders got pucks deep, cycled in the offensive zone and generally looked threatening.
This one, instead, came down to almost inexplicable moments of error.
Like Sebastian Aho coming onto the ice slowly and allowing the Capitals to enter the zone with numbers. Aho got on the backcheck ,and Semyon Varlamov made an acrobatic save on Nicolas Aube-Kubel but could not stop Nic Dowd from getting on the rebound to put the Capitals ahead 2-1 at 13:05 of the second.
Or like Matthew Phillips, a 5-foot-7 rookie, beating Noah Dobson and Scott Mayfield to the puck behind the net before finding Aliaksei Protas strolling down the slot for a one-timer to make it 3-1 before the second intermission.
Or like Ovechkin scoring the game’s first goal with a wrist shot from a faceoff 9:18 into the night, with the very same play the Capitals ran to get Ovechkin a shot on their first offensive zone draw of the night.
In between those moments, the Islanders were playing fine hockey.
Pierre Engvall looked motivated in his return from an unceremonious benching two nights earlier in Boston. Simon Holmstrom was fitting well with the first line.
All four forward groups had good moments, at least until they were bizarrely shuffled in the third period as the Islanders hoped for a comeback.
And the Islanders even took advantage of the rookie goaltender when Shepard was caught out at 19:17 of the first, letting Alexander Romanov tie the game at one with his first goal of the season, a shot into an empty net.
But just two nights after Lambert bemoaned his team’s inability to play a 60-minute game, the Islanders turned in a performance in which they played unobjectionable hockey for about 55 minutes and fundamentally collapsed the rest of the way.
As a result, they have tossed away a 5-2-2 start to the season and will take a 5-5-3 record with them on a four-game trip to Western Canada.
It is imperative for this team that things start to go right out west. It may be imperative for Lambert’s job status, too.
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