BUFFALO — A road trip that started on a high ended with a giant splat.
The six-game win streak that saw the Islanders vault themselves back into playoff contention moved well out of sight in the rearview mirror on Thursday with a second straight defeat in disastrous fashion, 4-0 to the Sabres, as the visitors turned in a dilapidated and tired performance at KeyBank Center.
“For some reason, I thought we were flat tonight,” coach Patrick Roy said. “We didn’t play a good game.”
Instead of taking momentum back home with them, the Islanders are trudging back to New York needing very much to refind the game they so recently unlocked with just a solitary day off before a matinee back-to-back against Ottawa and the Rangers.
This was a night where pretty much everything that could go wrong did, with the Islanders struggling to put together basic fundamental parts of their game, passing and receiving the puck poorly while looking out of sync all night.
“[Ilya Sorokin] was unbelievable tonight. It could’ve been a lot worse,” Bo Horvat said. “We gotta be a lot better than that if we want to win hockey games.”
The Islanders’ first shot on goal didn’t come until 10:15 into the game. Then after recording one 30 seconds into the second period, it took until the 7:20 mark to get their second of the frame. Shortly after, the train flew right off the tracks.
It looked for a while as though Sorokin could bail the Islanders out, with the goaltender playing at the top of his game, particularly in a first period that included an excellent glove save on Peyton Krebs.
But just 19 seconds after Anders Lee went off for interference early in the second period, Victor Olofsson found a way past the netminder, beating him with a sharp-angled look from below the right circle.
Just 5:19 later, the rout was on.
Dylan Cozens doubled Buffalo’s lead after Sorokin left Connor Clifton’s rebound free in the middle of the ice. Then Henri Jokiharju’s shot through traffic deflected off the stick of Zach Benson and in, with Roy losing a subsequent challenge for goaltender interference at the 9:41 mark.
“We weren’t executing very well and I think when you’re not executing very well in a game like that it’s best to fire as many pucks on net, get pucks deep,” Matt Martin said after returning to the lineup following a one-game absence with an upper-body injury. “We’re trying to make, probably one too many plays and we weren’t that sharp so they weren’t connecting like they have over the last couple weeks.”
All the while, the Islanders never looked remotely threatening until the game was beyond their reach, with the power play turning in an 0-for-4 night, in which the most eventful moments were Horvat hitting the post and Lee whaling on Clifton after the Buffalo defender took down Pierre Engvall.
Both those, however, came with the Islanders already down 3-0, with the latter resulting in the Islanders negating their own power play for the 19th time this season after Lee was given a roughing penalty in addition to a fighting major.
A resilient performance, this was not, as Benson added an empty-netter after Roy went six-on-five early.
This was instead the sort of performance the Islanders couldn’t afford, for reasons relating to their own confidence as much as the playoff race. All season, they have struggled to retain a high level of play over a long period of time and now, after accounting for 13 goals in the first two games of this trip, the Islanders have scored zero in their last 120:00 of play.
The only good news was that despite Tampa beating the Rangers, the Flyers and Red Wings both lost, allowing the Islanders to stay in the second wild-card spot.
Still, that won’t be for long if they can’t bounce back quickly.