Nobody throws parties for NHL-.500, and Islanders coach Patrick Roy was very much not in the mood to do so after watching his team take its foot off the gas at the end of its win Thursday.
Still, this day that started with good news and ended with two points marks as good a spot as the Islanders have been in for a while.
They can see a healthy team on the horizon, with Mat Barzal, Anthony Duclair and Adam Pelech all being full participants at a morning skate for the first time since getting hurt.
They can see the playoff cutline in their sights, now a point behind a spot and behind the struggling Rangers only due to games in hand, with both teams at 31 points.
The goal has been to tread water until healthy, and after beating the Blackhawks, 5-4, at UBS Arena on Thursday, the Islanders are back at NHL-.500 — the definition of treading water — with wins in three of their past four and a group of injured stars getting close to returning.
Any good feelings, though, were cut short by a furious head coach, who watched his team stop playing hard and let up three straight goals in the final 10 minutes, with Tyler Bertuzzi pulling the Blackhawks to 5-4 with two goals a minute apart, the second coming with 10 seconds to go in the game.
“In my days, if my team would have done that to me, I would break a stick in that room,” Roy said. “I’d be very upset to see my team playing like this in front of me. Ilya [Sorokin] is a gentleman, he’s a first-class person, but that was unacceptable. We didn’t compete. We didn’t battle in front of the net in the last eight minutes. That’s unacceptable.”
The Islanders entered the third period with a tenuous 2-1 lead but broke the game open over a three-minute stretch in which Noah Dobson, Bo Horvat and Max Tsyplakov all scored, prompting Chicago to pull goalie Arvid Soderblom in favor of Drew Commesso.
Prompted in part by Roy juggling his lines in the second period, with Horvat going between Anders Lee and Pierre Engvall and Tsyplakov returning to skate with Brock Nelson and Kyle Palmieri, the Islanders appeared to have calmed themselves down and taken complete control after a poor start.
Dennis Cholowski and Simon Holmstrom erased a 1-0 deficit in the second with consecutive goals from the top of the zone, and the third looked like a continuation.
The competitive portion of the night appeared to be very much over, and the crowd — which booed the Islanders off the ice after a lackluster first period — was enjoying the show.
Though the Blackhawks never looked like a real threat to win the game, with only 10 seconds to try to tie the game and those coming with no real action, what came next led Roy to publicly rip into his team.
“We can’t play like this,” Roy said. “It doesn’t matter where we are, what’s the score — up, down, doesn’t matter. We gotta be better protecting our net, protecting our goalie. We have one of the best in the game. He doesn’t deserve that. I hope we feel bad about it. I really do. We gotta play the game for 60 minutes and play a certain way.”
It’s become commonplace this season to see the Islanders struggle on the ice without falling in the standings.
So maybe it only makes sense that the juxtaposition would be extended to Roy being as mad as he’s been all year at his group after a day in which their long-term outlook suddenly looks much better than it did 24 hours prior.
It’s undoubtedly true, though, that the Islanders look more than a few players away from being a Cup contender.
The standings, however, certainly imply right now that they are a few players away from being a playoff team.
“Sucks the way we played in front of Ilya at the end there to let him down,” Dobson said. “He gives us a chance every night. So that’s on us. We gotta be a lot better in those situations. But take the two points and move on.”