MONTREAL — Even when the Islanders look well on their way to getting blown out, they are not a team that goes quietly.
For 40 minutes on Saturday, this was the Islanders getting bossed around the ice by a Canadiens team that started the day in seventh place in its division, struggling to break the puck out and generating almost no pressure on Sam Montembeault.
Then for the next 20, it was a scrambling comeback attempt that ultimately fell short, turning into a 5-3 loss to the Canadiens that left the Islanders feeling very much like they left something on the table.
“Had we played that way in the first 40 minutes,” coach Lane Lambert said, “we’d be singing a different tune right now.”
Those games do happen when you play 82 of them, and the Islanders might be justified in thinking they can burn the tape and forget about it, given how well they’ve played over the last month and that they showed some fight in the third period.
The ultimately failed comeback started early in the second period with a pair of goals — one shorthanded and one at even strength — from Brock Nelson.
It looked like the Islanders might finish the job when Bo Horvat jumped on Noah Dobson’s rebound at 5:54 in the game.
But Christian Dvorak’s empty-net goal with 19.3 seconds to go confirmed they would not.
Ultimately, the Islanders were made to pay for what was an inexcusable first 40 minutes.
“It was ugly for us, the first 40,” captain Anders Lee said. “Just our execution [was] just off. We were off a little bit.”
The lesson from the night as a whole might be that — as much as Mike Reilly, Robert Bortuzzo and Samuel Bolduc have helped to fill the void on the back end — the Islanders could sure use Adam Pelech, Ryan Pulock and Scott Mayfield right about now.
They survived what was a sloppy and poorly structured start until the 7:45 mark in the second, when Joel Armia beat Semyon Varlamov from the slot after Alexander Romanov couldn’t win a puck battle along the wall.
Things fell apart quickly from there.
Josh Anderson, who went into the evening having not scored in 369:34 this season at five-on-five, would do so twice in the next 10 minutes, getting one through traffic from the high slot and stuffing in his own rebound at 19:06 of the period.
Just 15 seconds after that, the Islanders let Cole Caufield stroll into the slot uninterrupted and send a one-timer past Varlamov — a sequence that ultimately may have cost them a point or more.
“I just thought we were slow,” Lambert said. “I’ll give them credit, they were jumping on us, they were quick to pucks. We were slow with the answer to that and it was disappointing to see that.”
Whether as a result of tired legs on the second end of a back-to-back or an aggressive Montreal forecheck, the Islanders struggled to break the puck out.
They made mistakes around and behind their net and hoped it wouldn’t cost them.
Structurally, they were nothing short of a mess.
To a man, they made bad decisions with the puck and threw away the good habits that were built up over the course of the last four weeks.
“They were on us, they forechecked well, we weren’t coming out clean,” Dobson said. “Just disconnected. Led to a lot of time in our zone.”
Those habits did seem to return in the third period, though failing to collect any points underscores that the Islanders suffered the same failure to play 60 minutes that has dogged them for much of the season.
Still, ringing the alarm bells after just a second regulation loss over the last month would be silly.
The Islanders are capable of far better than they showed Saturday, that much they have proven.
But in a playoff race that, a third of the way through the season looks as though it will feature razor-thin margins, these are games where taking care of business would be well-advised.
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