So it is under a bevy of great opportunities gone unfulfilled that the Islanders find themselves buried, squirming now for the last breath of life in their plummeting season. To add insult to injury, they can look up only to find the ones tossing the last bits of indignity upon them are the Rangers.
As the two teams took their rivalry from one iconic venue in The Bronx to another, more conventional, venue in Manhattan, the end result remained the same. The Blueshirts backed up their 2-1 win outdoors at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday with a decisive 4-1 victory at the Garden on Friday, extending their suburban rivals’ losing streak to five games (0-4-1) and leaving them no option but to start doing the dubious math to see the grim chance left for another postseason appearance.
“It’s so magnified now, the wins we need and the points we need — it’s no secret,” said Islanders captain John Tavares, the league’s second-leading scorer held off the score sheet by the Rangers for the second consecutive game. “This loss, the outdoor game, the game before that, they’re all important games. We’ve had some opportunities going into third periods and being in games, and we haven’t gotten the job done.”
The Islanders (21-28-8) were undone with just over 12 minutes gone by in the third, with the game tied 1-1. That’s when defenseman Marc Staal made a great cross-ice pass to Derick Brassard, who beat Evgeni Nabokov over his glove to give the Rangers (30-23-3) a 2-1 lead.
“He seems to be more comfortable,” Rangers coach Alain Vigneault said of Staal, who also assisted on Brian Boyle’s opening score 3:29 into the first, equalized midway through the second when Kyle Okposo got his team-leading 24th of the season. “I’m hoping that it continues because he has been really solid back there for quite some time now.”
Before the game, before Brad Richards padded Brassard’s goal just 2:45 later and then Ryan McDonagh dumped one into the empty net to finish it off, Vigneault was adamant about how much Staal has meant to his team, especially how he handles himself off the ice.
“When he talks, he looks you in the eye,” the first-year Rangers coach said. “He’s thinking about the team all the time, and I’ve got a lot of time for players like that.”
Although Staal said, “It felt like a sauna in the first period” compared to the frigid Bronx temperatures the Rangers played through en route to their two-game Stadium Series sweep, the team continued its roll through all conditions, now 12-4-1 since Dec. 29 and solidly in second place in the Metropolitan Division.
The Islanders, on the other hand, remain in last, now nine points behind the Red Wings as the final wild-card holder, as Detroit holds three games in hand. Even with the influx of Lubomir Visnovsky, the failure of the power play was killer yet again, going 0-for-3 to make them 1-for-25 in their past six games.
The Islanders did pepper Henrik Lundqvist with a flurry of shots, 39 in total, many of them terrific scoring chances only to be thwarted. None was more jaw-dropping than the split save he made on Josh Bailey midway through the first that kept the Rangers ahead, 1-0.
“We had a lot of Grade A opportunities and we have to put the puck in the net,” Okposo said. “That was a big game for us, and we have to convert our chances.”
After this one, those chances are surely close to all gone.