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The Islanders managed to salvage a point on Sunday afternoon.
But if their season has come to that sort of moral victory, finding the positives from a home loss to Montreal, then rock bottom must look a whole lot like the scene at UBS Arena following a shootout in which Brock Nelson’s final attempt was stoned by a goaltender whose last NHL action came in April 2018.
The Islanders got to their locker room quickly after that. And the fans — at least the ones not wearing red — made a beeline for the exits.
After the latest embarrassment of this Islanders season, a 3-2 shootout loss to the Canadiens — who became the last team in the NHL to get to double digit wins with Sunday’s victory — there can be no more sugarcoating, no more veneer of optimism or wondering what if the Islanders do turn it around. After 45 games, the Islanders are 18-20-7. In the last three weeks, they have lost at home to two of the three worst teams in the league.
It can, technically, get worse. Similarly, the Islanders can, technically, still make the playoffs. Both of those scenarios, though, are quite hard to imagine.
The start was bad. The finish was bad. The in-between, mostly, was bad.
Brock Nelson gave the Islanders some badly needed momentum late in the third, tying the game at two on a goal he created all by himself with just under three minutes left in the game. But that momentum didn’t last long.
In the three-on-three overtime, the Islanders struggled to get a shot off, hunting for the perfect look instead of putting pucks on net. In the shootout, Mat Barzal and Nelson were both stopped by Andrew Hammond.
For the 11th time in 12 games, the Islanders gave up the first goal on Sunday, letting Jeff Petry’s shot from the point ricochet off Ilya Sorokin’s pad and in at 9:01 of the first.
The Islanders got that one back after Kyle Palmieri deposited a rebound at 1:29 in the second on the power play, but their momentum wouldn’t last. At 18:49 of the period, Josh Anderson was left all alone in the lower left circle and picked his spot for a wrist shot past Sorokin.
Hammond, playing his first NHL game in 1,400 days, finished the afternoon with an impressive 30 saves to Sorokin’s 25.
The Islanders couldn’t afford to lose this game, a sentence that feels like it could be written about nearly any of their recent losses.
It’s not a mathematical death knell to their season, not yet, but in any other sense, 2021-22 can be considered over and done with for the Islanders. They’re 18 points out of the postseason and just lost at home to the worst team in the league.
Just as important, this does not have the look of a team showing enough fight to claw back in the race. The Islanders say they know what they’re capable of, but the moments in which they’ve played like it have been few and far between.
Following Thursday’s win over the Bruins, Barzal said the Islanders had played “championship-caliber” hockey.
That begs the question, exactly what sort of caliber of hockey did they play on Sunday?
One imagines they wouldn’t like the answer to that one.
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