Islanders down Devils to clinch playoff spot and complete stunning season about-face
Plenty of options for the spot in the Islanders’ season when things looked their bleakest.
There was the overtime loss in Chicago on Jan. 19, after which Lane Lambert was fired and replaced by Patrick Roy with the team at 19-15-11.
There was the Stadium Series collapse against the Rangers in mid-February, the most emotionally gutting defeat in a season full of them.
There was the six-game losing streak in March that immediately followed a six-game winning streak, during which the Islanders’ playoff hopes appeared to be circling the drain.
But there is no arguing the moment where things looked their brightest.
Right now.
The Islanders partied like it was 2007 on Monday night as they clinched a playoff berth and third place in the East by defeating the Devils, 4-1, at Prudential Center, culminating a chase that had rocked back and forth enough to induce seasickness in unsuspecting fans by giving them something to celebrate.
They will face the Hurricanes in the first round starting this weekend in a rematch of the series they lost in six games at the same juncture last season.
“There was a lot of noise,” Cal Clutterbuck said inside a locker room that emitted triumphant shouts before reporters were allowed inside. “A lot of people telling us we weren’t gonna do it. Lot of people telling us we were too slow, too old, too this, too that. But we did it.”
This was not the Georgia Bulldogs pulling out a laughable nobody-believed-in-us trope. This was the conventional wisdom around the Islanders as late as two weeks ago. Too old, too slow and paying the price for organizational inertia.
But a 7-0-1 stretch in their last eight games, capped off by this win over the Devils that never looked in doubt, made fools of the conventional.
“Very, very, very proud,” coach Patrick Roy said. “We played some very good hockey down the stretch. They were resilient, they worked together. I think we learned how to win.”
Shift by shift, this was not the greatest game the Islanders have played. But this has been an eight-game run during which the whole has outweighed the sum of the parts, and so too was Monday night.
Aside from Timo Meier’s goal to make it 2-1 at 3:25 of the second, there was not a moment when the result appeared in doubt. Brock Nelson extended the lead back to two by corralling a loose puck in the slot and whipping it in at the 11:48 mark and the Islanders never looked back.
Otherwise, the night turned into a checklist with all the boxes ticked. Kyle MacLean scored to make it 4-1 after being a game-time decision with flu-like symptoms. Kyle Palmieri’s goal marked his 29th of the year — one away from tying his career high — and broke an 0-for-12 power-play streak in the process. The penalty kill was a perfect 3-for-3. Semyon Varlamov turned aside 23 of 24 shots in another rarely-troubled performance.
“I think everybody just realized how close we are to making the playoffs and then everybody dialed in,” Varlamov said of the last eight games. “Everybody started believing in ourselves more and more each game. Each game we won would just build more and more confidence.”
This has been an extraordinarily strange season, but the Islanders clinched in perfectly ordinary fashion. The Other Shoe dropped on them so many times that by Monday, it had run out of ammunition.
Now they will get to sit back and enjoy as the Capitals, Red Wings and Penguins fight it out for the final playoff spot in the East — and perhaps play spoiler to Pittsburgh on Wednesday.
“I think confidence comes from stacking up enough evidence in your favor that you can be who you think and say you are,” Clutterbuck told The Post. “And you do it enough times and in my mind, you get enough wins to get into a playoff spot, in this league, it’s earned. And there should be a lot of confidence that comes from that. We needed to show up a lot in these last 30 games and we did that.”
They did it to the tune of 17-10-4 over 31 games since the All-Star break — good enough to get in with a game to spare and exorcise some demons in the process.
“I think we had some things to fix, which we did, but I also think we had a lot — a lot — of bad luck for a stretch there with teams scoring on us late in games and losing them,” Clutterbuck said. “But none of it matters. None of it matters now.
“We get a chance to be in it. That’s all you can ask for.”
