With No Margin For Error, The Near-Misses Continue Piling Up For The New York Islanders

The NHL’s last three postseason tournaments have provided hard-earned lessons to the Islanders about the thin line between euphoria and agony and how much has to go a team’s way in order to win the Stanley Cup.

This year, the Islanders are getting reminders of how much has to go right just to make the playoffs.

The Islanders’ path back to contention grew a bit longer Sunday night, when they collected a season-high 43 shots yet fell to the Wild, 4-3, at UBS Arena. The loss to the red-hot Wild — who have gone 8-0-1 in its last nine games to move into third place in the Central Division — loss dropped the Islanders to 2-12-3 against teams in a playoff spot.

Such an extended track record of struggles against the teams they’re trying to join underlines the magnitude of the challenge ahead of the Islanders, whose hopes for a magical season were endangered by an unprecedented 1-2 punch during a a month-long stretch in the late fall.

“We lost wiggle room at the start of the year,” Islanders head coach Barry Trotz said Sunday night.

With the finishing touches still being applied to UBS Arena, the Islanders opened the season on a 13-game road trip — a franchise record and just one game shy of the longest road trip in NHL history. At 5-2-2, the Islanders were above 500 (real .500, not that silly NHL .500) with the end of the road trip in sight when they fell to the Wild on Nov, 7 and to the Devils on Nov. 11.

Four days after that, the Islanders fell under .500 with a 4-1 loss to the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning. The next day, Josh Bailey tested positive for Covid-19 — the start of a locker room-wide outbreak for the Islanders, who lost their next five games with an increasingly undermanned roster before the NHL finally paused their season on Nov. 27.

The Islanders, who had eight players test positive in their first wave of positive cases, lost their first three games following the resumption of play Dec. 2 to run the losing streak to 11 games (0-8-3), the longest a 14-game losing streak during the dark days of the 2010-11 season.

The Islanders are 10-6-1 since snapping the losing streak Dec. 7, which puts them on a 102-point pace over a full 82-game season. No 100-point team has ever missed the playoffs.

Of course, the Islanders don’t have the benefit of 82 games to make this run. Playing at the pace they’ve established over the last 17 games would get the Islanders to 92 points, which would be a notable feat given how badly things went at the start of the season but would still leave them needing a collapse from the Bruins or Capitals in order to qualify for the playoffs.

The Islanders have five games in hand on the Bruins, whom they trail by 17 points for the Eastern Conference’s second wild card, and eight games in hand on the Capitals, who hold the first wild card. any lenghty winning streka by the Islanders needs to be accompanied by an extended tailspin for the Bruins or Capitals.

And to build that winning streak, the Islanders are going to need better fortune than they’ve experienced over the last 10 days. The Wild opened the scoring in quirky fashion 3:36 after faceoff Sudnay, when Joel Eriksson Ek backhanded a shot on net from the corner and Brandon Duhaime put back the rebound, and doubled the lead with a power play goal fewer than two minutes later. Minnesota later added a pair of redirected goals.

The Islanders’ previous two losses — to the Maple Leafs on Jan. 22 and the Kings on Jan. 27 — each featured Semyon Varlamov giving up goals in the final 10 seconds of a period.

“It’s not coming easy for us and they’re sort of ending up a little bit easy for the opposition right now,” Trotz said.

Trotz also lamented the puck luck going against the Islanders, which is what happened at the end of each of their last three stirring playoff runs. The Islanders looked like a Cup contender after sweeping the Penguins in April 2019, but they were swept by the Hurricanes in the conference semifinals after a shot by Jordan Staal glanced off the skate of Robin Lehner and into the net for the overtime winner in Game 1.

The Islanders’ Cinderella run to the final four in the Canadian bubble in 2020 ended with a Game 6 overtime loss to the Lightning in which Brock Nelson was stopped on a breakaway minutes before Anthony Cirelli scored the series-winner. And last spring’s electric charge ended with a 1-0 Game 7 loss to the Lightning in which Yanni Gourde scored the only short-handed goal by an Islanders opponent all season.

Now, springs and summers filled with wondering what could have been — and given how quickly the Lightning dispatched of the Canadiens in a five-game Stanley Cup Final, it’s easy to envision how close the Islanders were to finally getting that fifth parade down Hempstead Turnpike in July — are threatening to yield a season defined by rotten luck in the fall and near-misses thereafter.

“We’ve got (45) games left, so I can’t tell you what the other teams are going to do,” Trotz said. “But obviously, we’ve got to gain some ground.”