The best place to dispel doubt is on the ice.
Islanders coach Lane Lambert was under fire last week. His team has now strung together consecutive wins for the first time in nearly a month.
Islanders captain Anders Lee was not making enough of an impact. He has now scored twice in three games.
The Islanders were at risk of their season going underwater because they could not hold leads in the third period.
Now they are back above .500 on Thanksgiving Day following a 3-2 home victory over the Flyers in which they defended a third-period lead.
“I don’t know if you could call it confidence,” Cal Clutterbuck said following his 1,000th career game. “Confidence comes from doing the same thing over and over and over again until you have a stack of proof that no one can deny. One day isn’t gonna give you confidence. You gotta do it every day.”
The Islanders certainly don’t have a stack of proof. But this made for a good start if they are building one.
It looked like things might be primed to go downhill when the Flyers cut a 2-0 lead in half just over a minute after Brock Nelson tipped in Adam Pelech’s shot from the point.
Cam York cleaned up his own rebound at 14:18 of the second to make it 2-1, and it all looked very familiar.
Then, 2:33 into the third period, there was Nelson again, taking a backdoor feed from Pierre Engvall and tapping it in to bring the lead back to two.
“Didn’t feel like it broke us at all,” Nelson said.
The Islanders spent the rest of the third bearing down and defending.
More importantly, they did so effectively — not merely sitting back and inviting pressure, but forcing the Flyers to go 200 feet and playing with desperation.
It was not the easiest night Ilya Sorokin has ever had, but it was straightforward, which is more than can be said for a lot of his starts this season.
The goalie responded by stopping 34 shots, making big saves when he needed to — including a sprawling stop with his pad on a Cam Atkinson rebound early in the third — and never looking stretched beyond his means.
“Feeling comfortable in the net,” Sorokin said. “It was a good night for us. I want to win for Clutter.
”One thousand games is amazing. I’d [keel over] if I played 1,000 games. Play for Clutter, win for Clutter. It’s Clutter’s night tonight.”
Joel Farabee’s backdoor tap-in with 4:04 to go caused a spate of nerves as the lead was whittled back down to one. But ultimately, it held.
It was the first home win for the Islanders since Oct. 26 against Ottawa.
And it followed a blueprint the Islanders should be trying to repeat.
Stylistically, the Islanders are also starting to resemble the sort of team they aspire to be.
Case in point, the rolling forecheck established within the first 10 minutes of Wednesday’s game, with the fourth line fittingly leading the way.
The Islanders have generally played well in first periods this year and took a lead Wednesday when Lee stuffed his own rebound past Carter Hart just 1:49 into the match.
But that did not lead to them sitting on their haunches.
The Islanders had more sustained offensive zone time in this game than they have perhaps all year.
They got below the hashes, controlled play and limited chances against an opposing Flyers team that is, so far, smashing expectations this season.
The Islanders turned this into a low-event game, the kind that not so long ago they thrived at winning, and wouldn’t you know it, they looked right at home.
“I think our first forechecker’s getting in,” Lambert said. “And he has to do that in order for the other two guys to read off him. I thought we did a much better job of that the entire [Western] trip and probably a little bit better on the trip than we did tonight. But it’s definitely trending up.”
It’s still a long way to go for the Islanders to get out of the hole they dug for themselves.
Toward that end, the post-holiday back-to-back in Ottawa on Friday and back at UBS Arena against the Flyers on Saturday will be crucial.
But the past two games have proved a pretty good argument for keeping the faith.
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