If Patrick Roy’s three games as coach of the Islanders were the first three games of the season, you would be optimistic.
Despite the Islanders losing to the Golden Knights and Canadiens, you could look at the advanced numbers and see a lot of good things.
After a choppy game against Dallas — which the Isles won in overtime — they’ve earned a huge majority of the shots and chances over their last 120 minutes of hockey.
Their 6.72 expected goals for in Montreal marked not just their highest mark of the season, but their highest since Natural Stat Trick began counting the stat in 2007-08.
You would throw around terms like small sample size and regression to the mean and figure that if the Islanders kept on playing like that, they’d be in pretty good shape over 82 games.
“We dominated the whole second half of that game,” Noah Dobson said Thursday following the 4-3 loss to the Canadiens and, statistically speaking, he was very much correct.
But here’s the problem.
The Islanders don’t have 79 more games to figure this out.
They have just 34.
They’re five points back of the Flyers — with a game in hand — for third place in the Metropolitan Division and four points back of the Red Wings for the second wild-card spot.
And they need to get past the Devils, too, with New Jersey tied with them on points (51) and holding two games in hand.
That doesn’t put them out of the playoff race, especially if they can put together a run following the All-Star break.
After all, that’s how the Islanders made it last season.
But it does mean they can’t just wait and assume things will fall into place because the advanced numbers are good.
There’s no time for that.
“It doesn’t feel like we’re making a lot of [mistakes],” Bo Horvat said. “It’s just that every one we make is going in the back of the net. That’s the way it’s going right now but, again, we can’t feel sorry for ourselves or make excuses. Just gotta be better.”
Tacitly, that’s an acknowledgement of two problems.
First, the Islanders’ goaltending has been good — its .904 cumulative save percentage is seventh in the league — but not great, especially recently.
The wear on Ilya Sorokin over 15 straight appearances was evident, and Sam Montembeault got the better of Semyon Varlamov on Thursday, when the Islanders’ netminder stopped 22 of 26 shots.
Second, the Islanders’ penalty kill has been shocking all year, ranking 31st in the league at just 72.97 percent.
The only five-on-five goal Montreal scored Thursday was the game-winner.
With those two factors taken together, it’s not especially surprising that the Islanders can’t paper over their mistakes the way they did in 2022-23, when they had a top-10 penalty kill and the second-best save percentage in the league.
Having Varlamov back from injury should help now that Sorokin doesn’t need to play every night. And like nearly every other element of how the Islanders play, Roy is making some changes on the PK.
“We’re playing more of what they call the diamond kill, taking away the flanks,” Horvat said. “There’s good hockey teams out there and teams are gonna find ways to get around it. They made a couple nice plays out there, it’s not like we were crazy out of position.”
Saturday’s game at UBS Arena against the Panthers is the Islanders’ last before eight days off, which should give Roy some time to zoom out and assess where his team is ahead of what will be a crucial month.
The March 8 trade deadline will come quickly after the All-Star break and the Islanders have a decision to make on how aggressive to be — particularly if Adam Pelech is set to miss serious time after being on the receiving end of Brendan Gallagher’s elbow to the head during Thursday’s game.
If time was on the Islanders’ side, things would look just fine right now. But they don’t have that luxury.
