The Islanders have all but fallen to irrelevance on the national stage.
Playing two games in three weeks will do that to you. So will going from preseason Stanley Cup pick to bottom-dwellers in the division.
Now that they’re finally coming back with a game against the Devils on Thursday night — fingers crossed, pending the Devils’ COVID-19 testing results — they’re facing what might be their last best chance to mount a charge. Barring more schedule changes, the Islanders are about to play 11 games in the three weeks before the All-Star break, 10 at home, with two back-to-backs and not more than two days off between games.
The Islanders will be as healthy as they’ve been since early November, with Ryan Pulock the only key player still missing. They have games in hand to help close a 14-point gap between themselves and the Bruins, the last wild-card team as of Wednesday morning. They are rested — all too rested — and have quietly gotten points in their last four games, a fact easy to overlook when the last four games span nearly a month.
And this is still the same roster that was projected to be so good, that had barely started its season before things started going sideways, and through little fault of their own. The Islanders couldn’t control a 13-game road trip to start the year, a COVID-19 outbreak that forced them to field an AHL Bridgeport roster at UBS Arena or the league forcing them to sit for the better part of a month. But they can control whether the disappointment continues from here.
“I think just focus on the game,” head coach Barry Trotz said this week. “I know it’s a little bit cliche but if you take the attitude that you know you’re not gonna win every game. You just gotta focus on the opponent ahead. Just start climbing. It’ll come quick.”
Trotz won’t be behind the bench Thursday after going into COVID protocol Tuesday afternoon — the sort of bad luck typical to the Isles this year — but they’ve already won a game with Trotz out and Lane Lambert running things.
“We weren’t too concerned about that going into last game,” Josh Bailey said, referring to the New Year’s Day win over the Oilers, which Lambert coached. “.We knew Lane was gonna do a good job, just like he did. We didn’t think too much about it.”
For the shocking amount of bad luck that’s gotten in the Islanders’ way, they’ve done a remarkable job of not dwelling on it and keeping their focus ahead, at least when the cameras have been rolling.
“When somebody tells me there’s a game to be played that day, I’ll show up and be ready to play it,” Cal Clutterbuck said early on in the latest shutdown.
That sort of attitude speaks well on a group that’s packed with veterans. And it won’t mean much if the Islanders can’t put some wins together.
In the next 10 days, they’ve got the Devils, down to their third-string goaltender; two games against the Flyers, losers of five in a row; and the historically bad Arizona Coyotes. This would be a good place to start.
A winning streak may not be enough to get the Isles in the postseason. Despite games in hand, they have a large gap to make up, and public models peg their playoff chances around 10 percent. That’s not nothing. But it is a steep hill to climb.
“We’ve had some great time here to prepare for the rest of our home stretch, the rest of the year,” Anders Lee said Tuesday.
The truth of those words will be tested. And fast.