ST. LOUIS — The 2023-24 Islanders have been nothing but bizarre, so here came another inexplicable chapter of the season.
The Islanders on Tuesday played a generally unobjectionable 59:28 of hockey, but found a way to lose 4-0 to the Blues thanks to a 32-second spurt straight out of their own nightmares.
“We’re gonna have to stop shooting in our own foot night after night,” coach Patrick Roy said. “We played well enough to win tonight. But we’re making critical mistakes at the wrong time.”
Right when the Islanders appeared on their way to killing off Kyle MacLean’s second-period penalty for slashing, Brandon Saad got free at the backdoor to convert Oskar Sundqvist’s pass for a 1-0 lead following a failed clearing attempt by the Islanders.
Seven seconds after that, after the Islanders won the ensuing faceoff, they failed to corral the puck and lost track of their men in the defensive zone, allowing Pavel Buchnevich to score.
Then 25 seconds after that — with Roy calling timeout in the interim — they let Buchnevich get free yet again to make it 3-0 in less than the time of a bathroom break.
“That clear on the PK,” Roy said, “was, to me, the difference in that game.”
It was the fastest three goals scored in Blues history and the fastest three allowed in Islander history. The visitors exited the second period having outshot the Blues 20-9 over 20 minutes, while simultaneously having lost their grip on the game — a stat that feels representative of the season far more than one period of one game.
“Coach calls timeout, we gotta regroup,” Ryan Pulock said. “We let it happen again. It’s just unacceptable.”
There was no coming back for a team whose mental fragility was the theme of the night, though Roy did keep things interesting by moving Mathew Barzal to the third line with Oliver Wahlstrom taking his spot on the first for the rest of the game. Roy also switched up his defensive pairs, with Adam Pelech skating with Noah Dobson while Alexander Romanov went with Pulock.
Buchnevich completed his hat trick after Roy pulled Semyon Varlamov on a four-on-four with over 10 minutes left in the game, scoring into an empty net to complete the Islanders’ misery.
Jordan Binnington also completed a shutout, stopping all 38 shots he saw on a night where the Islanders’ power play was an abysmal 0-for-5.
The Islanders’ deficit in the playoff chase is now five points after Tampa lost and the Red Wings won, though they do have two games in hand on the Lightning, with a crucial home game against them coming Saturday.
For a team that has strung together consecutive wins just once since December, though, five points feels like a pretty big gap.
And for all the bizarre happenings of this season, there is a commonality to most of those games: the Islanders have been on the losing end.
Staving off the Penguins and winning in overtime on Tuesday might have been the start of something.
But instead, Thursday looked like the same Islanders we’ve seen since October. Just good enough to make you wonder how they lost.
