For a little over 20 minutes on Sunday you wondered whether, for the third game running, the Islanders would lose despite playing reasonably fine hockey. And then all at once, the floodgates opened and that notion was washed away, replaced by two points — a potential blip on the radar erased before it even appeared in full.
When the Islanders had stopped their scoring and the hapless-by-choice Blackhawks had left the building, the final score was a workmanlike 3-0, the record was 16-10-0 and the Isles had done what playoff teams are supposed to do: pick up an easy victory at home against one of the league’s worst teams.
“I thought we played great hockey,” said goaltender Semyon Varlamov, who earned his first shutout of the season.
In real time, the first and ultimately fatal blow was noticed not by the referees, nor the crowd, nor really by anyone besides Matt Martin, whose falling shot got past Arvid Soderblom and trickled over the goal line at the near post, but bounced back out before anyone other than Martin saw it cross over. As play continued, it looked as though Martin was asking for a tripping call as he gesticulated, when in fact he wanted the play reviewed.
And after over two minutes of play later, when the play was finally reviewed, it turned out Martin had scored to give the Isles a 1-0 lead at 8:58 of the second period.
“I was laying on my back and I thought it was in, I was pretty confident it was in,” Martin said. “Where the ref was, he was on the side of the net so he couldn’t tell. … Long review, longer than I thought it needed to take. Glad in the end it counted.”
It did not take all that long from there for the Islanders to wrest firm control of the match.
The 2-0 goal came from Zach Parise at 14:31 of the second, on a deflected Adam Pelech shot. The 3-0 goal came less than a minute later, at 15:14, when Brock Nelson beat Soderblom on a rush feed from Anthony Beauvillier. And so went the competitive portion of the evening.
From there, the last 20 minutes became a formality, just as the first 20 minutes had been forgettable. Reflecting the score, the Islanders nearly doubled Chicago’s shot total, finishing with a 40-21 margin.
In a year where not many Islanders wins thus far could be described as routine, this one very much was. They dominated the shot count, kept the defensive-zone structure intact — particularly when without the puck — and kept Semyon Varlamov well outside of trouble.
“I think we’ve done a better job in the defensive zone,” coach Lane Lambert said, citing how the Islanders contained Nashville’s Roman Josi and Chicago’s Seth Jones in their previous two games. “We’ve done a good job, I would say, of limiting their movement and keeping them to the outside. That has led into us transitioning and creating more shots.”
On paper, this should have been a forgettable win. On the ice, it was. And in a match where banking points was critical, the Islanders did just that. They also avoided their first three-game losing streak since mid-October.
“You saw our season last year,” Martin said. “We weren’t banking points early in the year. Never really got any traction when we got our legs under us, we were chasing it from the get-go.
“So all teams go through adversity throughout the season, but Game 1 or 25, it’s just as important as Game 75 or 82. … Get as many wins, get as many points as we can and in the end, I like our chances to be where we want to be.”
Indeed, the businesslike way in which the Islanders dispatched their opposition served as another reminder that this year is not last year. This team is not perfect, not by a long shot, but it is in the race, and deservedly so.
Oh, and if Chicago’s weekend trip to New York served as an audition in the Patrick Kane sweepstakes, then the final score of that was Islanders 1, Rangers 0.
