The Islanders might as well burn the tape. All 82 games of it.
Their season, which sputtered along coughing up plumes of smoke like a broken-down engine, finally came to an end on Friday night with a 6-4 loss to the Lightning. Six months ago, they were envisioning the Stanley Cup coming to a new address along the Hempstead Turnpike. Now?
They’re going home with a 37-35-10 record, and you wouldn’t blame them for being a little bit relieved that it’s over.
“It’s a part of this group’s journey or story or whatever you want to call it,” Anders Lee said. “It’s part of our way to get where we want to go. It’s not going to be as linear as maybe we wanted it to be and expected it to be. Now it’s time to regroup.”
The last 60 minutes of the season came and went, with the Lightning coming back down 3-1 in the third period to tie the game on Ryan McDonagh’s goal at 10:10 of the period. Steven Stamkos then provided the game-winner at 11:13 after Noah Dobson and Josh Bailey ran into each other to create an odd-man rush, ending a season of collapse in fitting fashion. Stamkos would later finish off a hat trick with a goal to seal the victory at 17:50.
Zdeno Chara’s goal with 43.4 seconds to go cut the lead to 5-4 — and gave the Islanders a feel-good moment as he scored his first goal all season on home ice in what might be his last NHL game — but it wasn’t enough for the win, as the Lightning responded with an empty-net goal.
For both teams, though, Friday was about moving on to Saturday — when the Lightning can turn their focus to the Toronto Maple Leafs, and when the Islanders can start what will need to be an exhaustive look at why that vision from October didn’t even come close to fruition.
A large part of that equation is the sheer bizarreness of the season, with nearly all of it hurting the Islanders. Following Thursday’s game, Islanders coach Barry Trotz said the team’s immune systems were shot — and wasn’t just referring to COVID-19, but to a stomach flu that made its way around the room over the last few weeks.
In a season where things have gone so wrong that the bad luck even extended to the team’s broadcast booth, with Brendan Burke and Butch Goring both missing games due to health reasons over the last month, that’s a darkly fitting end.
Everything about this year’s schedule, from the opening 13-game road trip to a final eight weeks in which the team got two days between games just twice, seemed designed to inflict maximum pain both mentally and physically.
“I know and I feel that there’s a really good core here, other good pieces, but it’s hard to evaluate ourselves cause it seems like we’re so far back from the eight [playoff teams] in the East, cause we’ve been chasing them all year,” Trotz said. “You don’t feel as close.”
The Islanders are left to try and figure out what to take from it all as they look to next season with an aging roster that failed to meet expectations amid a season that crumbled down around them.
“We might be closer than we think,” Trotz said. “That’s the blessing of it. The thing is, we have to make up some ground somewhere. That’ll make us very determined.”
Trotz, who will miss the playoffs for the first time since 2014 with the Predators, admitted Thursday that doubt crept in with the team’s struggles. Mathew Barzal made no such admission, saying that the lack of a complete roster gave them a situation that was hard to work with.
“I think there’s some tired bodies in that room,” Barzal said Thursday. “Just a lot of mileage this year, it felt like. Obviously not where we thought we’d be coming into the start of the year. We thought we’d be competing for the Cup and at the end of the day, thought we had a better second half. I think when this roster was healthy, we’re still one of the tougher teams in the league to beat.”
Certainly, there’s some truth in that. Exactly how much, though, is an important distinction, and one that GM Lou Lamoriello will need to parse over the coming weeks.
At the end of the day, though, the reality is hard to swallow. For the first time since 2018, the Islanders will be sitting on their couches watching the first round of the playoffs. They’ve known for a while that this was the likely outcome, and they’ve known officially for a couple weeks.
But that doesn’t make it easier.
“I think opening night we had a group that we believed in,” Lee said. “And we didn’t play good enough hockey at the times that we needed to.”