VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Patrick Roy made no secret of how happy he was that the Islanders escaped Edmonton on Tuesday with a point after battling back to get to overtime in an eventual 4-3 loss to the Oilers.
But although that stance requires at least a tacit admission that the Islanders were badly outplayed by the Oilers, Roy didn’t sound all too worried when that was brought up.
“No, we just couldn’t move our legs at the end,” he said of the breakout issues that plagued the Islanders throughout the night. “Guys played, I don’t know how many minutes [Ryan Pulock] and [Scott Mayfield] played. Noah [Dobson] probably played close to 30 minutes, it’s a lot of minutes. But hey, we pick up points while we’re missing a lot of guys so we take them. And we should gain in confidence because we’re playing some good hockey. When we’re tired, we’re tired.”
Roy sounding an optimistic drum is nothing new, and it is perfectly justifiable to be happy with the point they got on Tuesday night.
But a 15-2 high-danger chance margin at five-on-five, and the Oilers looking a lot harder on pucks than the Islanders all night, might be worth raising an eyebrow at, even while conceding.
“I don’t know. I didn’t feel like we were getting completely out-battled,” Pulock told The Post. “I thought we held our own. There’s gonna be moments where you gotta find a way to win that puck battle and be heavier on it.”
In fairness, the way the ice was tilted on Tuesday night looks more like a one-off than a trend, though the Islanders — whose expected goals numbers far outpaced their actual results for the first 10 games of the season — have now played four straight games below 50 percent in Natural Stat Trick’s expected goals percentage.
It’s probably not a coincidence that flipped when all the injuries on defense hit, and Roy has made reference to the fact that the Islanders will need to spend more time surviving as opposed to driving play while they wait to get healthy.
Still, Tuesday night took that to an extreme they probably cannot continue to live with.
“It was good that we got a point and got something out of it,” Kyle MacLean said. “Overall, 60 minutes, I think we need a better game to get two points.”
Though it is too early to be looking at playoff tiebreakers, the Islanders’ frequent trips to overtime are already costing them.
They entered Wednesday tied on points for the last wild-card spot in the East, but tied for last in the entire NHL in regulation wins, the first tiebreaker, with just three.
The Islanders didn’t hold practice in Vancouver on Wednesday.