PHILADELPHIA — It took Frans Nielsen almost seven years of waiting and watching — and above all losing — before it came to him in one fell swoop.
It was this past Valentine’s Day in Madison Square Garden, the Islanders were coming into a rivalry game with the Rangers having lost five in a row and looking as if their annual swoon had begun.
“We played really bad in the first period,” Nielsen remembered, “down 2-0.”
But what happened next changed the fate of the season, changed the way Nielsen viewed the first 6 1/2 years of his career, all on Long Island, and changed his knowledge of what it took to win.
After the coaching staff berated the team during intermission, the fourth line of Casey Cizikas, Matt Martin and Colin McDonald started the second period. McDonald forced a turnover and took a hit to get the puck in the zone. Martin delivered a hit to Marc Staal behind the net, then Cizikas won a puck battle with Anton Stralman in the corner.
Cizikas then looked up and made a great pass in front to net-crashing McDonald, who netted a little poke passed an unsuspecting Henrik Lundqvist. All of sudden it’s 2-1, just 29 seconds into the period, and the world came into better focus.
“Pretty much from that shift, we’ve been playing the same way,” said Neilsen, whose team came back to win that game in a shootout. And although they wrapped up their first playoff berth since 2007, that effort seemed to mostly be absent in last night’s 2-1 loss to the Flyers at the Wells Fargo Center.
“We realized then what it takes and what we have to do to be tough to play against,” Nielsen said. “It’s been tough at times, but I always believed we had talent in here we just needed to figure out what it takes to win. It is hard work, you have to dig in and do it every night.”
It’s been even more satisfying for Nielsen as it’s his line with Kyle Okposo and Josh Bailey that has been able to produce the secondary scoring previously missing from the equation. Between the three of them, they had played 1,009 total games for the Islanders without a single playoff appearance.
Nielsen was the only player on the current roster around in 2007 when the Isles lost in the first round to the Sabres in five games. Yet as a rookie, he was a healthy scratch for all of them. The next season he was joined by Okposo and Bailey, and the three of them have wadded through the ugly waters of failure and development side by side.
“It stinks every year when you have to pack up and go home to watch the playoffs on TV,” Nielsen said. “You can feel the atmosphere even from the TV, the crowd, it looks so fun. It’s going to be amazing to finally be a part of it.”