The Islanders did Rocky one better.
Patrick Roy’s analogy equating his team to the fictional boxer on Tuesday morning made for some good fodder, but it was a little inconvenient that Rocky lost the fight in the 1976 classic.
No matter, the parallels between the battered and bruised Islanders and the Sylvester Stallone character stopped at the result.
The Isles beat the Golden Knights 2-1 on Tuesday night at UBS Arena behind shutdown defense and superb goaltending, winning their 11th game in 14 to stay within three points of a playoff spot.
“This morning I was talking about the story of Rocky. We don’t want to go down,” Roy said. “And I think people love people that refuse to go down. And when they go down, they go back up, and that’s exactly what we did.”
There’s not really a way to explain why the white-hot Islanders are suddenly playing their best hockey of the season despite seemingly half their team watching from the press box.
But the out-of-nowhere run — which looked as though it might be derailed with Mat Barzal’s injury, and after a seven-game winning streak was snapped Sunday at Florida — got right back on track Tuesday.
At a moment when the entire league is waiting for the Islanders to fade and wondering why they are not talking about selling off parts, they are sticking around in the playoff race and winning games in classic Islanders fashion.
Tuesday, they mucked up the game, slowed it down, kept it low-event and took advantage of the opportunities that came.
“It’s two points for us no matter if we had 10 shots or 50,” Tony DeAngelo said. “Massive win for us.”
The shot count was 19-8 Vegas after the second period, but it was Bo Horvat’s goal off the rush at 18:21 of the first that accounted for the difference.
With Ilya Sorokin continuing to play lights-out in the crease and the Islanders doing an effective job of keeping the Golden Knights to the outside, they had just enough to get this one over the line.
Vegas did take advantage of nearly 30 straight minutes of pressure when Brandon Saad slammed in Nicolas Hague’s rebound at the 8:40 mark of the third, tying the game at one.
Just 3:03 later, though, Brock Nelson put the Islanders back ahead, tipping in Alexander Romanov’s point shot.
That came after Nelson broke his stick on a faceoff, went back to the bench for a new one and reentered the offensive zone, with the Knights losing track of him somewhere during that sequence.
“He probably should’ve just used that [stick] in the first place,” Horvat joked. “He would’ve scored earlier.”
The Islanders sat back with this lead like they did so often in October and November to disastrous results, inviting pressure and hoping to just hang on until the buzzer sounded.
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This time, it worked, with Ilya Sorokin backstopping the win with 34 saves.
“As many shots as they had, I thought we did a pretty good job of limiting the Grade-As,” DeAngelo said. “When they had them, Sorokie was there to make some big saves. I just thought we were tight. They had more puck control, obviously, as the game showed, [but] it didn’t make a big difference for us.”
Maybe life without Barzal can run just as smoothly for the Islanders as life without half their defense.
Or, at least, maybe the Islanders can get through the next two games and into the two-week 4 Nations break still alive.
What they did Tuesday, with Vegas leading the high-danger chances 14-5 at even strength, doesn’t seem all that sustainable. But this stopped making sense a long time ago.
“With all the injuries kind of piling on, big guys, kind of in rapid succession, there’s really no other option: You just go out and play,” Nelson said. “Everybody in here, it just goes to show you the love for the game and the fight we have in the group.”